
Qass JJJi JtAa 
Book_^£jta 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT 




OLIVER CROMWELL. 
{After C. A. Waltner's etching, published in London, 1881.) 



OLIVER CROMWELL 

BY GEORGE H. CLARK, D. D. 
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS FROM 
OLD PAINTINGS AND PRINTS 



It is the property of the hero, in every time, in every place, 
in every situation, that he comes back to reality ; that he stands 
upon things, and not shows of things.— Carlyle. 




BOSTON 
D. LOTHROP COMPANY 

1893 



/tfins/y 



Copyright, 1893, 

BY 

D. Lothrop Company. 



(A U rights reserved) 



The heroic soul, amidst its bliss or woe, 
Is never swell'd too high, nor sunk too low; 
Stands, like its origin above the skies, 
Ever the same great self, sedately wise ; 
Collected and prepared in every stage 
To scorn a courting world, or bear its rage. 

Henley. 



Unknown to Cromwell as to me, 
Was Cromwell's measure or degree. 

He works, plots, fights, in rude affairs, 
With squires, lords, kings, his craft compares, 
Till late he learned, through doubt and fear, 
Broad England harbored not his peer. 

Emerson. 



PREFACE. 

If the historians, poets, novelists, biographers, 
essayists, reviewers and writers of school histories 
who wrote adversely to Oliver Cromwell between 
the years 1660 and 1860 were alive, the largest 
room in the British Museum Library would not 
hold them. For those who, between the years 
named, did partial justice to Oliver's memory a 
small alcove would suffice. In that alcove would 
be writers like Nathan Ben Saddi, who suggests 
that the Protector was both a "righteous man" 
and a "rogue;" and Smollet, who says that he 
was a " compound of villainy and virtue." Within 
those two hundred years Macaulay, with one ex- 
ception, was the only great writer who justly 
measured and fairly described the Protector. The 
exception was Thomas Carlyle. 

Carlyle, by five years of patient and impatient 
toil, has made it possible for such books as the 
present one to be written ; and yet, while making 
much use of the " Letters and Speeches," I have 
made but little use of the elucidations of this great 
biographer. 

In the library of Trinity College, Hartford, is a 



PREFACE. 

remarkable collection of old folios relating to Eng- 
land's civil wars, in which may be found the Clar- 
endon "Letters," the Clarendon "State Papers," the 
Thurloe " State Papers," Dugdale, Rushworth, Nal- 
son, etc. These six works contain a large part of 
the material from which the histories of the Com- 
monwealth and the Protectorate have been made. 
It is noteworthy that within the twenty thousand 
folio pages of these volumes there is not to be 
found one charge adverse to Cromwell which is 
supported by credible evidence. The vilification of 
the Protector, with the exception of a few allega- 
tions, the most important of which are refuted in 
the following pages, is limited to the nicknames with 
which he was branded : such names as " Catiline," 
" Tiberius," " Nero," " Domitian," " Devil," etc. 

It was natural that royalists who had been ex- 
cluded from English politics for many years, and 
who had been in exile and in poverty, should re- 
sort to calumny after Oliver was dead ; but it is 
strange that with a few false statements and the 
use of opprobrious titles, they should have suc- 
ceeded in making the greatest and the purest ruler 
of his country the most infamous of all on the 
pages of modern history. With the help, however, 
of David Hume they have done so. 

It is to be remarked that the only documents 
throwing light on Cromwell were published, or 
were in manuscript, prior to the year 1700. Parts 
of this old material, including Pepys's Diary, Mrs. 
Hutchinson's "Memoirs," and most of the "Letters 



PREFACE. 

and Speeches," are recent acquisitions ; but all 
writings of authority relating to the Protector were 
either in print or in manuscript by the year 1698, 
when Ludlow's " Memoirs " were published. Those 
who wrote after that date simply gave their opinions 
based on what they had read. This remark applies 
to all historians of the eighteenth and nineteenth 
centuries. 

It should also be remembered that outside of 
newspapers and pamphlets published during the life- 
time of Cromwell, the poetry of a few writers, the 
praise of Maidstone and of Milton, there was almost 
nothing produced for half a century that was not 
condemnatory. After the restoration of Charles 
II. the name and memory of the Protector rested 
chiefly on the attestations of royalist enemies ; 
but not wholly, for two or three Republicans, in- 
cited by military or political disappointment, made 
the charge of duplicity. 

Cromwell's best-known title, hypoerite, was so 
stamped on him, and so embodied in all kinds of 
English literature, that it was almost universally 
believed to be a just stigma, until the " Letters 
and Speeches " were produced by Carlyle in the 
year 1846. Since that date the real Cromwell, 
wise, true, pure, noble, has been recognized, and 
books wholly favorable to him have been written ; 
but to a large minority, if not to the majority of 
readers, he is still the "bad man," the "artful 
politician " and the " atrocious conspirator " de- 
picted by Clarendon and other historians. 



PREFACE. 

"I hate Cromwell," said a friend to me. "Have 
you ever read his speeches and letters?" I asked. 
"No, I wish to hate him." 

To the present writer, Oliver is the most interest- 
ing man who has ever had connection with the 
English Government ; more competent judges have 
pronounced him the ablest rider who has governed 
England. 

My thanks are due to the Eev. Edward E. Hale, 
D. D. ; to Mr. Frank B. Gay, of the Watkinson 
Library, Hartford ; to Charles J. Hoadley, LL. I). 
State Librarian of Connecticut ; to the Rev. Samuel 
Hart, D. D., Professor in Trinity College ; to the 
Eev. George Williamson Smith, President of Trin- 
ity College; to my brother, the Et. Eev. Thomas 
M. Clark, Bishop of Ehode Island, for courtesies 
rendered, and to the Et. Eev. Phillips Brooks, 
Bishop of Massachusetts, who has kindly allowed 
pictures from his collection to be reproduced in 
this book. 

George H. Clark. 

Hartford, Conn., April 29, 1892. 



ACKNOWLEDGMENT. 

The author and publishers desire to express their 
thanks to the following friends who have loaned valua- 
ble paintings and prints for reproduction in this book: 
Rt. Rev. Phillips Brooks. D. D., Boston Public Library, 
Harvard College, Rev. Edward Everett Hale, 1). I).. Mr. 
Philip L. Hale, and Mr. Justin Winsor, who have all helped 
forward most cordially the illustrations in this volume. 



CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER I. 

DEFAMATORY WRITERS. 

Misapprehension of Cromwell's character. — True esti- 
mate of the man. — Walter Scott's picture of him in 
" Woodstock." — Disclosures of Pepys's Diary. — Dr. 
Bates on the " Late Troubles in England." — Silence 
of the Puritans in the reign of William III. — Inscrip- 
tion in Westminster Abbey suppressed. — John Banks's 
book in 1739. — James Heath's " Fiagellum." — Wal- 
ler, Dryden and South's change of base. — John Cleave- 
land's verses and subsequent career. — Cowley's 
ghostly visions. — Jeffrey's review in 1S0S. — Ma- 
caulay's boyish scrawls. — Mrs. Hutchinson's " Me- 
moirs." — Ludlow's attack. — Hume's misrepresenta- 
tions. — Carlyle's discovery of letters and speeches. — 
Guizot's view of Cromwell. — Change of public opin- 
ion. — Service appended to the English Prayer Book 
in 1S37. — Recently expunged .... 

CHAPTER II. 

THOMAS CARLYLE. 

Carlyle's rectification of the popular sentiment. — 
Froude's testimony. — Carlyle's fresh material and 



CONTENTS. 

change of design. — Emerson's discovery of Carlyle. — 
Taine's opinion of Cromwell. — Seventeenth century 
Puritans as usually depicted. — No faithful pictures of 
the royalists. — Lord Thurlow's remarkable state- 
ment 30 

CHAPTER III. 

EARLY LIFE. 

Oliver's boyhood. — Early offense and church discipline. 
— His family not obscure. — King James visits his 
godfather. — Oliver's father and mother. — His home 
training. — Style of talk. — Dr. Peard's influence. — 
Marriages in the family. — Absurd stories of " Carrion 
Heath." — Education. — Sports. — His uncle's sumptu- 
ous house. — Funeral of his grandfather, Sir Henry 
Cromwell. — Second visit of James I. — Knights cre- 
ated. — Great display — The host impoverished by 
the king's visit. — The brewery business. — Oliver's 
alienation from his uncle. — Return from Cambridge 
after his father's death. — Royalist slanders. — Studies 
law in London. — Marriage. — Return to farmer's life 
in Huntingdon. 41 

CHAPTER IV. 

FARMER. 

Twenty years of farming life. — Influences of the re- 
gion and associates. — Alva's butcheries. — Refugees 
change the style of agriculture and other industries. — 
Association with Dutch settlers. — The friend of the 
poor. — A tolerably successful farmer. — Nicknamed 
" Lord of the Fens." — Loses his temper. — Habits of 
life. — Ambition not yet kindled. — Sir John Elliot's 



CONTENTS. 

death in the Tower. — Cromwell a silent member of 
the Parliament of 1628. —Eleven years to reflect upon 
what he heard there. — Reappears in the Parliament 
of 1640. — Removal to Ely. — Uugdale's story. — 
Cromwell's letter to Mrs. St. John. — Carlyle's com- 
ments 60 

CHAPTER V. 

WARRIOR. 

The soldier as distinct from the statesman. — Real causes 
of the civil war. — No serious opposition under Henry 
VIII. and Elizabeth. —The Puritans in 1581.— Bill 
for a " Fast in the House," and " Sermons. " — Froude's 
view as to the saving of the Church. — The day of 
vengeance. — Cromwell silent as yet. — Not prominent 
till he became a recruiting officer. — ^Gradual rise of the 
rebellion. — A war for prerogative. — The crisis pre- 
cipitated. — Rally of the leaders. — Cromwell's ap- 
pearance in the Commons. — Seizes a magazine. — 
Made captain of "Troup 67." — Enters upon his he- 
roic career at the age of forty-three. — Edgehill battle. 

— Reorganization of the army. — Series of successes. 

— Elevation in military rank. — Narrow escape from 
death. — Marston Moor. — Battle of Newbury. — 
General in command charged with weakness. — " Self 
Denying Ordinance" and " New Model." — Cromwell 
not to be dispensed with. — Encounter at Naseby. — 
Cromwell free from limitations. — End of the first civil 
war. — Cromwell and the Scotch army. — Great 
Preston victory. — The Irish war. — Apology for 
Cromwell's severity. — Contest with the Scotch Pres- 
byterians. — Fairfax declines to lead the army. — 
Cromwell made commander-in-chief. — Battle of Dun- 
bar. — Letter to his wife. — Battle of Worcester. — 
Cromwell's last battle in the field yS 



CONTENTS. 

CHAPTER VI. 

PARLIAMENT AND KINGSHIP. 

Parliament of 1628. — Cromwell's speech. — Parliament 
ends and he goes back to his farm. — Sent to the Par- 
liament of 1640 by the town of Cambridge. — The 
" Bishop's War." — Forced loans. — Scots and English 
not disposed to fight. — The Long Parliament. — Sent 
again by the town of Cambridge. — A member till its 
close in 1653. — Member of many committees. — Op- 
position to the Episcopal Church. — Archbishop Laud. 
— Beverning's letter to the States General. — Lon- 
doners petition for the restoration of the king. — Crom- 
well between 1646 and 1649. — Watching the course of 
events. — Negotiates with the king and gives him good 
advice. — The king plays a game of his own. — Es- 
capes to the Isle of Wight. — Cromwell clings to the 
hope of a compromise. — Proofs of his want of ambi- 
tion. — The Garter offered to him. — Danger of losing 
everything. — The one personal question in 1648. — 
Prayer meeting in Windsor Castle. — Polity of the 
Puritans. — Cromwell as a regicide. — England de- 
clared a Commonwealth. — Cromwell named Pro- 
tector. — Returns to London. — Grand reception. — 
Plampton Court assigned as his residence. — Com- 
ments of Frederick Harrison. — Parliament tries to 
perpetuate itself. — Cromwell breaks up " The Rump " 
and sends the members home. — Things go on with a 
Constable at the head of affairs. — The new Parlia- 
ment attempts many things and fails. — Cromwell be- 
comes Usurper as a matter of necessity. — Plots 
against his life. — Protectorate Parliament called in 
1654. — He takes strong ground. — Meanwhile he is 
engaged in getting up a navy. — Parliament ends with 
Cromwell's sending the members home. — Another 



CONTENTS. 

Parliament in 1656. — His fifth speech. — The king- 
ship offered him. — Great spectacle at Whitehall. — 
Title of king declined. — Admiral Blake's achieve- 
ments on the sea. — General recognition of Cromwell's 
ascendancy. — Cardinal Mazarin's attentions. — Order 
issued in the first year of Victoria's reign for a new ser- 
vice in the Book of Common Prayer. — Afterward 
rescinded by Act of Parliament- — Cromwell and Wil- 
liam III. the men who deserve, thanks and praise . 107 

CHAPTER VII. 

FOREIGN POLICY. 

Position of England under Cromwell. — Sudden recog- 
nition by the great European powers. — Proposed alli- 
ance on the part of Spain and France. — Cardinal 
Mazarin's deference. — Cromwell's assertion of dignity 
in foreign courts. — The lame ambassador from the 
States General. — Lords of His Imperial Majesty of 
Russia must take off their hats. — The Czar gives a 
dinner to Prideaux. — Portugal, Tuscany, Venice, 
Genoa, Tunis and Algiers pay homage. — Great ser- 
vices of Blake and Thurloe, one at sea and the other on 
land. — John Thurloe's volumes of " State Papers." — 
Walter Scott's estimate of those papers in 1S31. — 
Cromwell's career for the commercial and material in- 
terests of England. — The great protector of Protest- 
antism. — Treaties of peace with Denmark, Sweden 
and Holland. — Admiral Blake's wonderful career. — 
Atrocities of the Duke of Savoy stopped. — Inter- 
ference in behalf of the Huguenots at Nismes. — Wm. 
Lockhart's treaty with Louis. — While England rejoices 
over the acquisition of Dunkirk, Cromwell is at his 
daughter's bedside. — Effort to unite Protestant Europe. 
— The only English Protector the N. E. colonies ever 



CONTENTS. 

had. — Scheme to remove the colonists to a more con- 
genial clime. — The year 1S99, should be recognized by 
Massachsuetts and Connecticut . . . . 157 

CHAPTER VIII. 

LATER DOMESTIC LIFE. 

The family. — Carlyle's opinion of Richard, the elder 
son. — Cromwell always busy. — Life at Whitehall. — 
Dinner given to the Dutch ambassadors. — Singing of 
metrical Psalms. — Scene at Whitehall when peace 
was proclaimed. — A plot discovered to kill Cromwell. 

— Contrast between Whitehall and other European 
courts. — Saintliness of Cromwell's life. — His chari- 
ties. — His library. — Kindness to the medalist. — 
Dinner of clergymen at Whitehall. — Great time at 
Whitehall. — Interview with banished Jews. — Slips 
some of them into London. — Ludlow at Whitehall. 

— Cromwell's domestic life disturbed. — Inauguration 
as Protector. — Plot of the royalists. — The Governor 
of the Tower marches with artillery into the city. — 
Victory follows victory. — The Puritan stands front to 

the world. — Domestic afflictions. — Death . . 1S3 

CHAPTER IX. 

CROMWELL LETTERS. 

Letter to Mr. Downhall and Carlyle's comments. — Dr. 
Wells. — Mr. Benson.— Letter to Mrs. St. John, 1638. 

— Letters to his son-in-law. — Letter to his wife. — 
Refutation of the charge of hypocrisy. — Letter to his 
wife after the battle of Dunbar. — The war letters. — 
Letters of comfort and conferring honors. — Revela- 
tions made by his correspondence. — Letter of explan- 
ation to Anthony Hungerford, Esq. — Correspondence 



CONTENTS. 

as to his son's marriage. — Remarkable letter to Mr. 
Mayor, 1650. — The government in Ireland. — The Oli- 
ver Cromwell medal. —Plea for the artist. — Cardinal 
Mazarin. — Breaking up of the Long Parliament and 
calling of the Little Parliament.— His modest speech.— 
Wishes to retire.— Policy asjProtector— Toleration.— 
Letters to Am. Colonies.— Proposals to remove the col- 
onists from N. E. — Eliot Warburton's conjecture . 208 

CHAPTER X. 

CHARACTER. 

Only positive evidence adverse to Cromwell's character. 

— Groundless charges. — Brought up a Low Church- 
ma,-,. —Laud's appointment as Archdeacon of Hun- 
tingdon. — Cromwell defamed. — Testimonials in his 
f aV or. — John Banks's book. —John Maidstone's letter 
to Governor Winthrop. — Rev. Mr. Hooke's letter. — 
Milton's testimony. —Gardiner's History. — Strong 
verdict for Cromwell. — Taine as contrasted with 
Guizot. — Ruckle's opinion. —Cromwell's goodness. 

— Benevolence. — Tenderness. — Sense of justice. — 
Righteous anger. — Richard Garnett's words. — Fred- 
erick Harrison's summary. — Dean Stanley's testi- 
mony. —Bishop Burnet's estimate. — Thurloe's reply 
to Charles II.— What Lord Clarendon said of Mont- 
rose. — Macaulay the champion of the Protector. — 
Indifference to his literary reputation. — Religion of 
Charles II. and of Cromwell. —The Boston Adver- 
tiser of 1846. —Slanders connected with the death of 
Charles. — Article in the last Encyclopaedia Britan- 
n ica. — Justice beginning to be done to Cromwell's 
memory. —Carlvle's book not likely to be generally 
rea d. — New materials. — Call for a new life of 
Cromwell. —Summing up of his character . . 235 



OLIVER CROMWELL. 



CHAPTER I. 

DEFAMATORY WRITERS. 

I purpose to tell, iii a plain and simple way, 
the story of a hero who was neglected by the Puri- 
tans and defamed by royalists from the time of 
the restoration of Charles II. down to near the 
present age. The neglect on the Puritans' part 
is explained by history ; the malignity and false- 
hoods of writers devoted to the Stuarts requires 
no explanation. For nearly thirty years, from 
1660 to 1688, no one in England dared to pub- 
lish a history of the Protectorate ; and after 
William III. came to the throne, though danger 
of imprisonment and death for a true life of the 
Protector no longer threatened, there was not a 
writer — Milton and nearly all those who had 
1 



25 DEFAMATORY WRITERS. 

known Oliver being dead — who cared to face 
the odium which was sure to follow a eulogy. 
Thurloe, one of the ablest ministers of the 
seventeenth century, had hidden in the garret 
above his rooms in Lincoln's Inn that vast col- 
lection of papers now preserved in more than 
six thousand folio pages ; a mine from which all 
late historians of England's Civil War have 
taken materials for their books. Forty years 
after Oliver's death a writer whose name is un- 
known, ventured to falsify Ludlow's fabrications ; 
but we now search in vain for any book written 
in England within half a century of the Protec- 
tor's death in praise of him. And through the 
seventeenth century and for forty-five years of 
the present century not a book was published 
which did justice to Cromwell. For nearly 
two hundred years he was the sport and derision 
of historians, poets and novelists ; sometimes de- 
picted in an elaborate, glaring picture, like that 
in Walter Scott's " Woodstock ; " sometimes 
branded with infamy in a single line, like that in 
Gray's "Elegy." His letters, with a few excep- 
tions, were not printed ; and his speeches, full of 
thought, lay dormant through all that time. 
Not a man or woman in England or in this 
country read or could read them. 



DEFAMATORY WRITERS. 3 

The only man who during the long reign of 
Charles II. wrote favorably about Oliver was 
Pepys. Mr. Pepys was a man who was willing 
to sacrifice himself, both under the Protector 
and under the king. He was an officer in the 
Naval Department, and lived in London. He 
knew Oliver, and he often met Charles; met 
him on business, and in the parks, and in White- 
hall Palace. Mr. Pepys kept a diary. He wrote 
under a cipher which no one could read but 
himself. After his interviews with the king, he 
would go home and make pictures of him, and, 
for contrast, pictures of Oliver. If Charles 
could have got sight of Mr. Pepys's diary, and 
have found an interpreter of it in the year 1667, 
Mr. Pepys would not only have lost his place in 
the navy office, but he would have walked the 
streets of London without his ears, which would 
have been to him a great calamity. But Charles 
did not get hold of the diary. Mr. Pepys kept 
it concealed till his death. It then got, with 
Mr. Pepys's books, into Magdalene College 
library, Cambridge, and there it lay unread till 
about the year 1825. How strange that the 
only good words written about Oliver during a 
period of twenty-five years, should have come to 
the light in this present century. 



4 DEFAMATORY WRITERS. 

Iii one passage Mr. Pepys contrasts the feeble 
administration of the king with the strong ad- 
ministration of the Protector. "It is strange," 
he writes, " how everybody do nowadays reflect 
upon Oliver, and commend him, what brave 
things he did, and made all the neighbor princes 
fear him ; while here, a man come in with all 
the love and prayers and good liking of his 
people, hath lost all so soon, that it is a miracle 
what way a man could devise to lose so much in 
so little time." During the reign of James II. 
one would hardly have dared to praise Oliver 
even under a cipher. 

Doctor George Bates, physician to Charles II., 
published, in 1685, a book on " The Late Troubles 
in England." This book is now in the library 
of Trinity College, Hartford. Carlyle does not 
refer to it, and probably never saw it. Had he 
seen it he would have given Bates the same sort 
of immortality that he has given " Carrion 
Heath," the author of " Flagellum." The 
loyalty of Doctor Bates to the Stuarts is clearly 
indicated in his book. He speaks of the Star 
Chamber Court, and the Court of High Com- 
mission as " shining jewels in the imperial 
crown," and he says that those who in the time 
of Charles I. saw things which needed to be 



DEFAMATORY WRITERS. 5 

amended in the government, could see "joynts 
in a bull rush." After alluding to this king- 
as one who combined in his character the pa- 
tience of Job, the piety of David, and the wisdom 
of Solomon, he became really poetical in the 
royal cause. He says he will "hoist sail " and 
" launch out into the ocean of Charles's virtues." 
He then changes his figure and says that he will 
"by a few, and those clouded beams " give " what 
sight he can of that Sun," " the great defender 
of the laws." He calls Cromwell a " Blade," 
and a " great master in lvypocrisy and dissimula- 
tion." He becomes responsible for the most as- 
tounding, incredible lie ever told by a historian, 
and he gives the lie on the authority of eye-wit- 
nesses, who told him of the deed. He says 
that Cromwell " opened the coffin " which con- 
tained the dead king, and, "with his ringers 
severed the head from the body ; " evidently sup- 
posing that his readers would believe such a sur- 
gical operation possible. He gives particulars 
of the condition of Cromwell's body after death, 
which are too disgusting to be repeated. But he 
corrects one error, for which he should have full 
credit. He says that Oliver "yielded up the 
ghost about three of the clock in the afternoon ; 
not (as was commonly reported) carried away 



6 DEFAMATORY WRITERS. 

by the Devil, at midnight, but in clear daylight." 
He speaks of the " mercenary pen of the son of 
a certain scrivener, one Milton, a man of " livid 
and malicious wit," "employed to publish a de- 
fense of the king's murder." 

Carrion Heath and Buzzard Bates, the earliest 
literary champions of the Stuarts, whose books 
were once the delight of royalists, who gave in- 
spiration to later historians, and gave to English 
history a color and gloss which lasted for two 
centuries, and which, but for such investigations 
as Macaulay's and Carlyle's, would have lasted 
for two centuries more, are now, as authorities, 
happily extinct. In their day they were cele- 
brated, particularly the doctor, who was " a 
learned and eminent physician of London," who 
had " an easy access to most of the grandees," and 
whose book, when " in writing," was looked over 
by persons high in position. But after all, every- 
thing was not bright with Doctor Bates. In an 
" epilogue," he says that " there is an insolent 
defamer, who pretends I have fathered another 
man's work." Poor doctor, accused of literary 
theft ! charged with plagiarism ! and such plagi- 
arism ! Peace to his ashes. 

After William III. came to the throne, there 
was no danger of a Puritan's losing his life or 



DEFAMATORY WRITERS. 7 

liberty for anything he might publish in favor of 
the Protector ; but it required an amount of 
moral courage to defend him which no one seems 
to have possessed. And then it must be re- 
membered that thirty years and more had passed 
since Oliver's death. A great deal is forgotten 
in that length of time. Those who knew him 
were nearly all in their graves. The materials for 
a history, or even of a biography, were limited ; 
but doubtless the strong prejudice against the 
Commonwealth, and against Oliver, prevented any 
attempt to publish eulogies. To indicate the 
prevailing feeling, a fact may be given. In the 
year 1710, an engraver was at work in West- 
minster Abbey on a Latin inscription to the 
memory of the poet John Phillips. He came to 
the words " Uni Jfiltono Secundus" — next to 
Milton. The Dean of the Abbey stopped the 
engraver. That hallowed building must not be 
desecrated even by the name of Milton on an- 
other man's monument. John Phillips, with his 
poetry, must go down to posterity without it. 

Four years later, however, Addison meanwhile 
having put into the " Spectator " some papers 
about John Milton and his "Paradise Lost," it 
was decided by another Dean (Atterbury, who 
though a loyalist seems to have had sense) that it 



8 DEFAMATORY WRITERS. 

would do no harm to the Abbey to have Milton's 
name on John Phillips's monument. Things 
sometimes go strangely in this world. Phillips 
the poet, had a claim on the Abbey, for he had 
once made an attack on Oliver in a " Satyr 
against Hypocrites ; " but he was Milton's 
nephew, and in early life had written a defense 
of his uncle, whom Wood calls a "villanous 
leading incendiary." The canons and deans of 
Westminster, no doubt, talked a good deal over 
that "Uni Miltono Secundus" the relatives and 
friends of the poet, no doubt, told them that they 
had better let the engraver insert the words into 
the epitaph, and so John Phillips survives in the 
memory of men. 

Carlyle is usually rather limited in his praises 
of authors, and he is particularly so touching 
those who, before himself, wrote about Oliver ; 
but he might have said a kind word for John 
Banks who, in the year 1739, published a book, 
in the preface of which he asks, " whether a 
character, so much declaimed against, might at 
the distance of almost a hundred years be suffered 
to stand the test of a fair examination ? " It 
needed courage then even to attempt to subject 
the Protector to a "fair examination," and Banks 
should have some credit for his book. And 



DEFAMATORY WRITERS. 9 

Carlyle, too, might have spared Mark Noble, 
who put out his biography in 1787, the charge 
of ''extreme imbecility," and "a judgment for 
the most part dead asleep ; " for Noble, as his 
preface indicates, had at least discovered what 
other writers have but lately learned ; that Crom- 
well " was the greatest man that had owed his 
existence to England." 

The chief fountain of all the foolish lies that 
have been circulated about Oliver is the mournful, 
brown little book called " Flagellum " (a lash, 
whip, scourge), or the " Life and Death of Oliver 
Cromwell, the late Usurper," by James Heath. 
The book had on its title page a picture of the 
Protector with a halter about his neck. Five 
editions were published between 1663 and 1679 ; 
but now the book is not to be found in our libra- 
ries. It was not among the books which Carlyle 
bequeathed to Harvard University, and probably 
he used the copy which has been preserved in 
the British Museum Library. For nearly a hun- 
dred years royalist readers found consolation in 
"Flagellum ; " but when Hume appeared and put 
into eloquent language the fabrications which it 
contained, and added to them, Heath passed into 
oblivion. 

There were writers of Oliver's day who praised 



10 DEFAMATORY WRITERS. 

him while he was living, or soon after his death, 
who afterward defamed him, and among those 
writers were Waller, Dryden and South. Wal- 
ler, in the year 1643, was banished from England 
for engaging in a plot which cost some men their 
lives. Ten years later, when Cromwell was in 
power, he kindly permitted him to return from 
exile, and he then presented to the Protector, 
says George Craik, " one of the most graceful 
pieces of adulation ever offered by poetry to 
power ; " but when Charles II. returned Waller 
forgot or overlooked the generosity of Cromwell, 
and welcomed the king to his father's throne. 
The poem inspired by the restoration, however, 
was inferior to that which his release from banish- 
ment called forth ; and it is related that Charles 
told the poet that his panegyric was not so good 
as Cromwell's ; to which Waller replied that 
poets succeeded better in fiction than in writing 
truth. 

Dryden, when Richard became Protector, wrote 
a long poem on Cromwell, in which are found 
the following lines : 

" His grandeur he derived from heaven alone, 

For he was great ere fortune made him so, 

And wars, that rise like mists against the sun, 



DEFAMATORY WRITERS. 11 

" His ashes in a peaceful urn shall rest, 
His name, a great example, stands to show 

How strangely high endeavors may be blessed 
When piety and valor jointly go." 

Dryden's changes and apostacies came easily 
and naturally to him, we believe ; but these verses 
were probably a true expression of his emotions 
at the time when he wrote them, soon after the 
death of the Protector. The lines are not mere 
poetry. 

Oliver was by nature a grand man. He was 
great before success made him appear so. Wars 
did not make him greater grow, only made him 
seem greater to the common eye ; and in spite of 
the stigmas cast upon it, his name a great ex- 
ample stands, and will stand, to show how high 
endeavors may be blessed. England is reaping 
to-day fruits from the seed which he sowed. "We 
in this country are reaping blessings from the 
changes which he and the Long Parliament 
secured. 

Dryden greeted Charles on his return with his 
"Astraea Redux ;" but during the reign of this 
king he wrote, he says, only one play for himself ; 
all the rest, nearly thirty in number, were, he 
admits, " sacrifices to the vitiated taste of tlie 



12 DEFAMATORY WRITERS. 

Robert South, a student at Oxford, wrote a 
eulogistic poem on Oliver telling him that he 
"only could the swelling waves restrain," and 
lay " fetters on the conquered main ; " but when 
South had become Doctor South, chaplain to 
royalty, he drew in a sermon a picture of Oliver 
which delighted the king and his court. " Who," 
he said, "that had beheld such a bankrupt, 
beggarly fellow as Cromwell first entering the 
Parliament House, with a threadbare, torn coat, 
and a greasy hat (and perhaps neither of them 
paid for), could have suspected that in course of 
so few years he should, by the murder of one 
king and the banishment of another, ascend the 
throne, be invested with royal robes, and want 
nothing of the state of a king but the changing 
of his hat into a crown." 

We now come to John Cleaveland, who for 
many years was supposed to be greatest among 
living English poets, and who was the "first 
champion of the royal cause who wrote in Eng- 
lish verse." 

From the beginning of the war to the end he 
was a royalist. Next to Cowley he claims our 
sympathy, and he commands our respect. His 
picture is not flattering, but it was honestly 
drawn. 



DEFAMATORY WRITERS. 13 

" What's a Protector? He's a stately thing 

That apes it in the non-age of a king ; 

A tragic actor, Caesar in a clown, 

He's a brass farthing, stamped with a crown! 

" In fine, he's one we must Protector call, 
From whom the King of kings protect us all." 

Cleaveland was active in the royal cause in 
1655, and he found himself in prison. A 
prisoner, he appealed directly to Oliver. He 
wrote a letter to him, and wrote it in a spirit 
that would commend itself to a large-minded and 
generous-hearted man. There was no apology in 
the letter. It bore no resemblance to letters 
which many Englishmen, including Lord Bacon, 
had written to get themselves out of trouble. 
" For the service of his majesty," he said, " if it 
be objected, I am so far from excusing it that I 
am ready to allege it in my vindication. I cannot 
conceit that my fidelity to my Prince should taint 
me in your opinion; I should rather expect it 
should recommend me to your favor. The truth 
is, I am not qualified enough to serve him ; all I 
could do was to bear a part in his sufferings, and 
to give myself to be crushed by his fall." Had 
Cromwell possessed the spirit of not a few Euro- 
pean rulers the letter would have been unheeded, 
or would have led to a closer oversight of the 



14 DEFAMATORY WRITERS. 

prisoner, but lie had nothing little in his nature. 
The tone of the letter must have touched him — 
the poet had his freedom. 

Lord Clarendon, in his " History of the Rebel- 
lion," admits that the Protector had courage, in- 
dustry, judgment and a wonderful understand- 
ing ; but he ends his eulogy thus : " He had all 
the wickedness against which damnation is de- 
nounced, and for which hell-fire is prepared," 
. . . and, " he will be looked on by posterity 
as a brave, bad man." 

Abraham Cowley's vision touching Oliver is a 
remarkable one. A kind of governing demon of 
the Protector appears first to the poet, and then 
Cromwell himself, or rather his ghost, appears. 
In the dialogue which ensues, the demon ad- 
vances arguments which Cowley finds it difficult 
to answer ; which he cannot successfully answer. 

" What more extraordinary," says the demon, 
" than that a person of mean birth, no eminent 
qualities of body or mind, should succeed in the 
destruction of one of the most ancient and most 
solid monarchies u]^on earth," ..." put 
his prince and master to an open and infamous 
death, banish that numerous and strongly allied 
family ; trample upon Parliament as he pleased, 
spurn them out of doors when he grew weary of 



DEFAMATORY WRITERS. 15 

them ; oppress his enemies by arms, and all his 
friends afterwards by artifice ; serve all parties 
patiently for a while, and command them victori- 
ously at last ; be feared and courted by all 
foreign princes, and adopted a brother to the 
gods of the earth ; call Parliaments with a word 
of his pen, scatter them with the breath of his 
month ; have the estates and lives of three king- 
doms as much at his disposal as was the little 
inheritance of his father ; be as noble and liberal 
in the spending of them (the estates), and be- 
queath all this with one word to his posterity ; 
to die with peace at home and triumph abroad ; 
to be buried among kings with more than royal 
solemnity, and to leave a name behind him not 
to be extinguished with the whole world;" 

This demon was not far amiss in parts of his 
picture. 

But now Cowley himself encounters Oliver ; 
but Oliver, the poet admits, takes what he says 
coolly, and even mirthfully. The poet sees " a 
figure taller than a giant, the body naked, the 
battle of Naseby painted on the breast, the eyes 
like burning brass, three crowns of red-hot metal 
on the head, a bloody sword in one hand ; in the 
other hand acts, ordinances, protestations, cove- 
nants, enGfao-ements, declarations, remonstrances." 



16 DEFAMATORY WRITERS. 

Cowley was not at all daunted, he tells us, by 
this apparition. He faces the figure bravely, 
and calls out to it, " What art thou ? " Oliver, 
being now a spirit, answers in a boastful tone, 
unusual with him when on earth. He answers, 
" I am called the Northwest Principality, His 
Highness, the Protector of England, Scotland 
and Ireland." The poet and this monstrous 
creation of his fancy hold further intercourse ; 
and then Cowley says : " Here I stopped, and 
my pretended Protector, who I expected would 
have been very angry, fell a-laughing at the sim- 
plicity of my discourse." No wonder that Oliver 
thought that Cowley had made a ridiculous pict- 
ure, with the red-hot crowns, brass eyes and 
Naseby battle painted on the breast, and laughed 
at the poet's simplicity ; the wonder is that Cowley 
should have printed such a dream. Kind ami- 
able poet ! we wish you had been under the Pro- 
tector's wing, as Milton was ; but fate called you 
to kiss the hand of the meanest of the Stuarts. 

In the year 1808, six years after the first num- 
ber of the " Edinburgh Review " came out, Francis 
Jeffrey, its chief editor, expressed his doubt 
whether any historian " had given a more just or 
satisfactory account of this extraordinary person- 
age, Oliver Cromwell, than Mrs. Hutchinson, 



DEFAMATORY WRITERS. 17 

whose husband, the Colonel, had « very early dis- 
covered to possess the profonndest duplicity.' M 

When he wrote this passage, Jeffrey knew no 
more of Cromwell than the precocious little 
Macaulay, then eight years old, who, in 1807, 
wrote in his epitome of history that Oliver " was 
an unjust and wicked man." This "boyish 
scrawl," says Trevelyan, may still be read ; the 
boy lived to throw light on the Commonwealth 
and on Cromwell. 

Two things Mrs. Hutchinson would have left 
out of her " Memoirs," had she been a shrewd 
woman. She would have omitted the fact that 
General Cromwell did not estimate highly the 
soldierly qualities of her husband. That was a 
discovery made by Colonel Hutchinson before 
his wife heard of Oliver's " duplicity." It hurt 
Mrs. Hutchinson's feelings to think that the 
general of the English army did not appreciate 
Colonel Hutchinson as an officer. She blurts out 
her feelings about this matter in her " Memoirs ; " 
she had better have written nothing about them 
if she expected readers to believe her aspersions 
on ,01iver and his family. But she had another 
and deeper grievance, which shall be told in her 
own words. 

"The Protector finding him (Col. H.) too 



18 DEFAMATORY WRITERS. 

constant to be wrought upon to serve his tyranny, 

bad resolved to secure his person, lest he should 
head the people, who now grew very weary of his 
bondage. But though it was certainly confirmed 
to the Colonel, how much he was afraid of his 
honesty and freedom, and that he was resolved 
not to let him longer be at liberty, yet, before 
his guards apprehend the Colonel, death impris- 
oned himself, and confined all his vast ambition 
and all his cruel designs into the narrow compass 
of a grave." 

The allusion in this passage to Oliver's resolu- 
tion to secure the person of Colonel Hutchinson 
and deprive him of his liberty, lest he should 
"head the people and attack the government," 
throws light on the good wife's appreciation of 
her husband's executive and military abilities ; it 
would be interesting to know if she reflected at 
all on the probable result of a conflict between 
the Colonel at the head of " the people," and 
Oliver commanding the Ironsides. 

Mrs. Hutchinson's "Memoirs," instead of being 
" satisfactory " touching Jeffrey's k - extraordi- 
nary personage" of •• the profoundest duplicity," 
are wholly unworthy of notice. They contain 
the ebullitions of a woman who had within her 
insurmountable prejudices, founded on a con vie- 



DEFAMATORY WRITERS. 19 

tion that her husband had not been rightly valued 
as an army officer ; they contain the unjust cen- 
sures of a writer whose virulence reached not 
only the immediate object of her aversion, the 
Protector, but his wife and children, and the 
court at Whitehall, which is described as " full 
of sin and vanity." She tells, however, one 
thing which is either favorable for Oliver, or 
damaging to the Puritan clergy : " Almost all 
the ministers everywhere," she informs us, " fell 
in and courted this beast." 

Mrs. Hutchinson and Ludlow have done more 
to create wrong impressions about Oliver than 
all other Puritan writers. Indeed, we are not 
aware that any old books, written by Puritans 
decidedly adverse to the Protector, are in exist- 
ence, though scattered passages left by his Pres- 
byterian, Anabaptist and other opposers can be 
found. It has seemed to the writer remarkable 
that so few of his contemporaries, great men, 
members of Parliament, army officers, came into 
collision with him ; that so few have left records 
of their opposition to him. - 

Of those who openly opposed the Protector 
and the Protectorate, Ludlow is the most con- 
spicuous. He was twenty years younger than 
Oliver. Bishop Warburton says that one may 



20 DEFAMATORY WRITERS. 

judge of the spirit in which his "Memoirs " were 
written by his character, which was that of " a 
furious, mad, but apparently honest Republican 
and Independent." He was an Oxford graduate, 
a Temple Bar man, an army officer, one of the 
six men who arranged Pride's Purge, which was 
as much a political crime as the disruption of 
the " Rump," one of the king's judges and a 
signer of his death warrant. He was an ambi- 
tious and an able man. 

Cromwell had proved himself the abler soldier 
and the more successful politician. Ludlow be- 
came his enemy and made no secret of his 
position. He went to Whitehall soon after 
Oliver was made Protector, had an interview, 
avowed his opposition to the government, but 
promised to be peaceable so long as he saw no 
chance of overthrowing it. He asked to be per- 
mitted to retire to his home in Essex, and the 
request was granted. At Essex, Cromwell kept 
his eye upon him, and, even on his death-bed, 
on August 30, 1658, hearing that Ludlow was 
on his way to London, the Protector sent Fleet- 
wood to ask what his purpose was in leaving 
Essex. Ludlow replied that he was going to 
see his sick mother-in-law. A tempest that day 
was raging over England ; it stopped Ludlow's 



DEFAMATORY WRITERS. 21 

coach at Epping ; it was typical of a worse storm 
soon to come. 

The state of mind in which the famous " Mem- 
oirs " were written can be inferred from these 
facts. 

Ludlow thought he discovered the ambition of 
Oliver for a crown as far back as the battle 
of Worcester, when the general, in his letter to 
Parliament, spoke of the success as a " crowning 
mercy." Oliver was not in the habit of punning, 
and had he been, he would have had sense enough 
to know that a play on words sent in an official 
letter to the Parliament, would not conduce to 
his elevation to the throne. 

A momentary imbecility combined with jeal- 
ousy can only account for Ludlow's imputation. 

And when the time arrives to save the nation 
from anarchy, " the perfidious Cromwell," says 
the embittered, malignant author, " forgetting his 
solemn promises, takes off his mask, resolves to 
sacrifice all victories to his pride and ambition, 
under the color of taking upon him the office, as 
it were, of a high Constable in order to keep the 
peace of the nation, and to restrain men from 
cutting each other's throats." No words could 
better indicate Oliver's position than those with 
which this sentence ends. Oliver's letters, his 



22 DEFAMATORY WRITERS. 

5] aches and his actions. Milton's, Maidstone's 

and others' testimony, will throw light on this 
M perfidious " Protector before our book is done. 
Who would not be kind to Ludlow's memory, 
and remember what he endured when England 
no longer had a Constable ? Thirty-three years 
of banishment ! That was the penalty which 
he paid for his work in saving his country from 
Stuart tyranny. The present writer little thought, 
when standing, twenty years and more ago. at 
the exile's grave in Vevay, that the duty would 
ever fall to him. in vindication of Cromwell, to 
write a line adverse to Edmund Ludlow, the 
great Republican, who failed to see that in his 
time in England one man •• alone remained to 
conduct the government and to save the country." 
ssing down half a century we come to 
Hume. Touching Oliver. Hume venger. 

He worked in royalist sewers, dragged out the 
Protector uncleaned, put him in a historical 
picture-gallery between the Stuarts, and there he 
has been for a century and a half : the sight of 
him a delight to royalists, but an offense to Pur- 
itan England and to not a few Americans. Lt-t 
us look at Hume's statements, and remember that 
for rive or six generations he was pre-eminent 
for defaming- Cromwell. 



DEFAMATORY WRITERS. 23 

Hume tells his readers that Oliver was " an art- 
ful politician," " an atrocious conspirator," " a 
fanatical hypocrite," " a barbarian," and " a crim- 
inal, whose atrocious violation of sacred duty 
had, from every tribunal, human and divine, 
merited the severest vengeance." 

These amenities will recall to the reader two 
sewers, Clarendon and Cleaveland ; and, doubt- 
less, " Carrion Heath," from his " Flagellum," 
furnished the historian with nouns and adjectives ; 
as to substantiated facts, adverse to Oliver, there 
are none in these old books, nor in any books 
published before or since the year of " unspeak- 
able mercies," 1660. 

There is but little in the speeches of Cromwell 
that is obscure or difficult for a modern reader ; 
and it is unreasonable to suppose that the men 
of Cromwell's Parliament, many of whom had 
listened to Eliot and Pym and Wentworth, should 
listen patiently for two and even three consecutive 
hours to a man who spoke without "one glimmer 
of common sense ; " it is incredible that they 
should propose to make such a man their king. 
But Hume tells us that Cromwell did speak to 
his Parliaments " without one glimmer of com- 
mon sense." He tells us that Cromwell's elocu- 
tion was " always confused, embarrassed, unin- 



24 DEFAMATORY WRITERS. 

telligible." He tells us that he "spoke in a 
manner which a peasant of the most ordinary 
capacity would be ashamed of." Such is Hume's 
estimate of speeches which are now read by some 
readers with more intense interest than any other 
speeches printed in our language, and which 
have been ranked by Canon Farrar with the 
speeches of Chatham, Pitt, Fox and Burke. 

Hume further says, that " a collection of 
Oliver's speeches, sermons and letters, with a 
few exceptions, might pass for a great curiosity, 
and one of the most nonsensical books in the 
world." The collection of speeches and letters 
made by Carlyle is, indeed, a curiosity. Hume 
himself, whom historians now unite in calling 
untrustworthy ; who painted the Stuarts black 
on one page, while he wrote on another that they 
were white ; whose works innumerable readers 
have devoured, age after age, with the certainty 
of becoming accurately informed about the past ; 
whose history has passed through more editions 
than the writings of any other English historian, 
perhaps, excepting Gibbon, is now the curiosit}% 
while Oliver's " Letters and Speeches " are re- 
garded as permanent additions to history, unsur- 
passed in value by no writings of past centuries. 

Met at first by a sale of his history in Eng- 



DEFAMATORY WRITERS. 25 

land of only forty-five volumes within a year, 
and by cries of reproach and detestation, in 
which royalists, just recovering from the fear of 
the return of the Stuarts, largely shared, he be- 
comes, when all danger of a second battle of 
Culloden is over, the most popular historian of 
England ; he revives the old and almost extinct 
enthusiasm for the banished royal house. Scores 
of new editions are called for before the century 
has closed ; millions of people in peaceful homes, 
which they owed to the Long Parliament and to 
Cromwell, read and re-read his pages with de- 
light, and outside of England no history, except- 
ing that in the Bible, secured so many readers ; 
but Hume's day as a historian, let us hope, is 
nearly gone ; he will be read, at no distant time, 
only for his eloquence. 

It is not my purpose, within the compass of 
this book, even to name the English authors who, 
in describing Oliver's character, have followed in 
the track of this false historian. A mere cata- 
logue of the names of those who, after Hume, 
wrote adversely up to the year 1849, when War- 
burton published his " Prince Rupert and the 
Cavaliers," defaming Cromwell in it, would re- 
quire many pages. But there is one French 
writer who calls for a brief criticism. 



26 DEFAMATORY WRITERS. 

Guizot has remarked that Cromwell's " relig- 
ious faith had exercised but little influence over 
his conduct ; " that " determined to become great, 
with cynical recklessness he had yielded to the 
passions of this world." A more unjust state- 
ment, based necessarily on information derived 
from royalist writers, and from Ludlow and Mrs. 
Hutchinson, does not stain the page of history. 
Guizot knew almost nothing of Cromwell ; had 
never read his speeches or his letters ; was igno- 
rant of his life, except as it had been depicted 
by enemies, and besides, it is to be remembered 
that this statesman held opinions about govern- 
ment which unfitted him to form a correct esti- 
mate of a man like Cromwell. He failed to see 
what France needed in the time of Louis 
Philippe, or, if he saw, failed to use his knowl- 
edge ; and it was not his place to instruct English- 
men about the civil wars of the Stuarts, or to 
tell them that Cromwell aspired to leave his name 
and race in possession of a throne, but that " his 
crimes raised up obstacles against him which he 
could not surmount." 

The reader must judge for himself, when he 
comes to the narrative of Oliver's life, about 
the truth of these aspersions ; but the present 
writer cannot refrain from commenting on them. 



DEFAMATORY WRITERS. 27 

Religious faith had but little influence on his con- 
duct ! It was the guiding- star of his entire life 
after he reached manhood. The proof ! His 
private letters, his deeds of charity and mercy, 
the testimony of men contemporary with him, 
whose characters have never been impeached — 
Maidstone and others. Yielded to the passions 
of the world with cynical recklessness, in order 
to become great ! Oliver's only recklessness was 
shown in meeting dangers in war, and exposing 
himself, as Constable, to assassins during the 
Protectorate ; not a line is to be found in his 
letters, nor a word in his speeches, nor an act in 
his life, to indicate a desire for position and 
greatness ; the evidence all points in other direc- 
tions : to the farm of St. Ives, and to a private, 
unnoticed life. Aspired to leave his name and 
race in possession of a throne ! If so, his reti- 
cence, his complete silence, his neglect to train a 
son to fill his place when he is gone, are unac- 
countable. If so, why did he not name his suc- 
cessor ? It is not proved that voluntarily he 
even spoke of Richard when near his death ; it 
is probable, however, that one of his Council 
named the son, and that he, having no special 
earthward aspirations at the moment, with feeble 
breath answered Yes. His crimes raised up 



28 DEFAMATORY WRITERS. 

obstacles against him which he could not sur- 
mount ! This is nonsense ; a rhetorical nourish. 
The only obstacle which Oliver Cromwell ever en- 
countered which he did not surmount, was death. 
In closing this chapter it is impossible not to 
recur to the marked and, indeed, wonderful 
change in the tone of books in regard to Crom- 
well since the middle of the present century. 
Guizot, Southey, Walter Scott, John Forster, 
Eliot Warburton, all eminent writers, wrote 
adversely about the Protector ; some of them 
bitterly, virulently ; but since the year 1850, not 
one eminent man, the present writer thinks, has 
published a malignant or even defaming book. 
In 1857, according to usage at the beginning of 
a new reign, under the order of " J. Russell," 
minister of Her Majesty, Victoria, a blasphemous 
service, bearing hard on Oliver, was introduced 
into the English Prayer Book ; but that service 
has been expunged by act of Parliament. A 
tory review, a few years ago, announced that Oli- 
ver's character was a problem still to be solved ; 
but no Englishman, inclined to Stuart royalism, 
since the announcement was made, has, we be- 
lieve, undertaken to solve it. That problem was 
forever solved, for the reading public, in the 
year 1846. 



DEFAMATORY WRITERS. 29 

The only recent publication which we have 
seen, which has in it the old royalist tone, is 
an American school history book, published in 
New York in 1891, which teaches children that 
Oliver's " perverted ambition . . . prompted 
him to wade through slaughter to a throne." 



CHAPTER II. 



THOMAS CARLYLE. 



Thomas Carlyle, by collecting and publish- 
ing, with elucidations, the letters and speeches of 
Oliver Cromwell, brought into the light a hero 
who had been regarded for almost two hundred 
years, by nearly all readers of English histoiy, 
as a great soldier pretending to piety of which 
he was destitute ; and who, simply to gratify his 
personal ambition, aimed to seat himself on the 
English throne. Even at the present time, nearly 
fifty years after the publication of Carlyle's book, 
both in England and in the United States, the 
great majority of people who have any impression 
about the Protector, believe him to have been a 
hypocrite, and a selfish unprincipled usurper. 

It is seldom that a person can be found here 
in New England who does not hold the views 



THOMAS CARLYLE. 31 

about Cromwell to which Hume, and writers who 
have copied Hume, have given currency. There 
are but few, even among our learned men, who 
have read Cromwell's letters and speeches. There 
are many who hate the name of Cromwell. There 
are some, advanced in age, who do not wish to 
abandon their life-long prejudices, and who will 
not seek light on this supreme historical person- 
age. There are others who have tried to read 
Carlyle's famous book, but have been repelled 
by the " dry as dust " and " anti dry as dust " 
contents of the first chapter, and the preliminary 
work of the second and third chapters. We ad- 
vise readers to begin at chapter four. 

Carlyle's work was not whitewashing, it was 
simply cleaning ; the kind of work done by re- 
storers of old pictures, or of old walls, on which, 
beneath the filth of centuries, are fine frescoes. 
Mr. John Fiske has written : " We have long 
had before our minds the colossal figure of Eoman 
Julius as the foremost man of all this world ; 
but as the seventeenth century recedes into the 
past, the figure of English Oliver begins to loom 
up as even, perhaps, the more colossal." True, 
and why does that figure begin to loom up now ? 
Simply because a few scholars like Mr. Fiske 
have read Carlyle's " Cromwell," and are able to 



32 THOMAS CARLYLE. 

see the man whom no historical scholar saw, or 
could see, fifty years ago. 

The calm, cool, judicious Ha 11am, for instance, 
who was no advocate for political theories, but a 
judge, and the fittest man of his day to write the 
" Constitutional History of England," had not a 
true conception of Oliver, and he does our hero 
some injustice. This historian, like his distin- 
guished contemporaries referred to in the preced- 
ing chapter, lived before the " full recovery of a 
true human figure of immense historical impor- 
tance from below two centuries of accumulated 
slander and misconception." The quotation is 
from Froude. 

Carlyle recognized the gradual change in opin- 
ion which was going on, and he remarks : " In 
spite of the stupor of histories, it is beautiful 
once more to see how the memory of Cromwell, 
in its huge, inarticulate significance, not able to 
speak a wise word for itself to any one, has, 
nevertheless, been steadily growing clearer and 
clearer in the popular English mind ; how from 
the day when high dignitaries, and pamphleteers 
of the carrion species did their ever memorable 
feat at Tyburn, onward to this day, the progress 
does not stop." But, while this is true, it is em- 
phatically true that the " Letters and Speeches " 



THOMAS CARLYLE. 33 

with the - Elucidations," have revealed to the 
world its greatest and its noblest ruler. 

Macaulay, as already intimated, saw more 
clearly than any writer of his time what sort of a 
man Oliver was ; but Macaulay had not the mate- 
rial to work on which Carlyle. by his patience 
and industry, secured. Could Macaulay have 
possessed himself of the letters and speeches, and 
then put into his plain and glowing language the 
thoughts which these letters and speeches suggest, 
the reading public would long ago have worshiped 
Cromwell's memory. It is harder work to read 
Carlyle than it is to read Macaulay's smooth sen- 
tences : but once having read him intelligently, one 
clings to him, and reads him over and over again. 
The debt, then, which we owe to Thomas Carlyle 
is a large one. With the letters, speeches and 
the elucidations he has made a picture of Oliver 
which no Stuart loyalist can ever mar or change. 
The order said to have been given to Lely, 
'•Paint me as I am," has been faithfully, accu- 
rately executed; and unless other letters and 
other speeches of a character wholly different 
from those now published, shall hereafter appear, 
the portraiture which he has drawn will stand, 
with not a blemish, amid the most notable his- 
toric portraits of modern times. 



34 THOMAS CARLYLE. 

Before deciding on Cromwell for a subject, 
Carlyle worked on the Commonwealth, and " lost 
four years of good labor in the business " — " four 
years of abstruse toil, obscure speculations, futile 
wrestling and misery." He then burnt a part of 
his materials, " locked away " the rest, and de- 
cided to make " Oliver the center of his composi- 
tion." He seems to have come slowly to the 
opinion that the Protector was the great and 
good man whom he represents him to have been. 
Indeed, from one of the Craigen-puttock papers, 
it may be inferred that he shared in early life 
the prevailing opinions on the subject. He says 
himself that he began " not knowing what he 
would make of it." He was in " a hideous, enor- 
mous bog." His " progress is frightful, but his 
conscience drives him on." After a time he 
thinks he shall " make something of it in the 
end," little dreaming that he would produce the 
most valuable historical book of his century. 
When he sees " some fruit " of his " unspeakable 
puddlings and welterings," and possesses himself 
of the " authentic utterances of the man Oliver, 
fished up from the foul Lethean quagmires, where 
they lay buried," he hopes that he shall " get 
the poor book done, and that it will turn out to 
have been worth doing." " If I can show Oliver 




OLIVER CROMWKLL. 

(From the portrait by Vanilyfo' ) 



THOMAS CARLYLE. 35 

as he is, I shall do a good turn." Such were the 
records of Carlyle in his diary, at about forty- 
five years of age, when editors of reviews and 
booksellers in England were still looking askant 
at him ; fearing to lose subscribers if they pub- 
lished his review articles, or fearing to lose 
money if they published his books. 

It is to the honor of New England that Emer- 
son discovered what was in Carlyle at a time 
when the man " expected nothing from the world 
but continued indifference ; " and sent him, when 
almost in the dregs of poverty, three drafts for 
the "French Revolution," from a Boston publish- 
ing house, before he had received one pound from 
London booksellers, for the same. 

As to his Cromwell, Froude says, " No shadow 
of a doubt about the genuineness of the portrait 
can be entertained ; " and he adds, " it is Carlyle's 
supreme merit that he first understood the speeches 
made by Cromwell in Parliament, and enabled 
us to understand them. Printed as they had 
hitherto been, they could only confirm the im- 
pression, either that the Protector's mind was 
hopelessly confused, or that he purposely con- 
cealed what was in it. Carlyle has shown that 
they are perfectly genuine speeches, not eloquent, 
as modern parliamentary speeches are, or aspire 



36 THOMAS CARLYLE. 

to be thought, but the faithful expressions of the 
most real and determined meaning, about which 
those who listened to him could have been left in 
no doubt at all." 

The greatest man, and the best ruler of the 
seventeenth century, at last is rescued from the 
slums of history by the greatest Englishman of 
the nineteenth century ; or to use the words of 
Chambers's Encyclopaedia : " To Cartyle has fallen 
the unspeakable honor of replacing in the Pan- 
theon of English History the statue of Eng- 
land's greatest ruler." Cowper's line, "Build 
him a pedestal, and say, ' Stand there,' " would be 
no unfit motto for the work which Carlyle has 
done for the memory of Cromwell. " Let the 
reader," says H. A. Taine, member of the French 
Academy, " consider Carlyle's Cromwell, and he 
will see with what justice, exactness, depth of 
insight one may discover a soul beneath its actions 
and works ; how, behind the old general, in place 
of a vulgar, hypocritical schemer, we recover a 
man." " One may follow him from his farm 
and team to the general's tent, and to the Pro- 
tector's throne ; in his transmutations and de- 
velopment, in his pricks of conscience and his 
political conclusions, until the machinery of his 
mind and actions becomes visible ; and the tragedy, 



THOMAS CARLYLE. 37 

ever changing and renewed, which exercised this 
great, darkling soul, passes, like one of Shake- 
speare's, through the soul of the looker-on." 

Again, says Taine : " We must read this his- 
tory of Carlyle to understand how far this senti- 
ment of actuality penetrates him ; with what 
knowledge it endows him ; how he rectifies dates 
and texts ; how he verifies traditions and genealo- 
gies ; how he visits places, examines the trees, 
looks at the brooks, knows the agriculture, prices 
the whole domestic and rural economy, all the 
political and literary circumstances ; with what 
minuteness, precision and vehemence he recon- 
structs before his eyes, and before our own, the 
external picture of objects and affairs, the inter- 
nal picture of ideas and emotions ; and it is not 
simply on his part conscience, habit, or prudence, 
but need and passion." 

Again we quote from Taine : " Grave consti- 
tutional histories hang heavy after this compila- 
tion. The author wished to make us comprehend 
a soid, the soul of Cromwell, the greatest of the 
Puritans, their chief, their abstract, their hero 
and their model. His narrative resembles that 
of an eye witness." ... u At last we are 
face to face with Cromwell. We have his words. 
We can hear his tone of voice ; we see him in 



38 THOMAS CARLYLE. 

his tent, in council, . . . with his face and 
costume ; every detail, the most minute, is here. 
Would that all history were like this ; a selection 
of texts provided with a commentary. Crom- 
well comes forth, reformed and renewed. We 
divined pretty well already that he was not a 
mere man of ambition, a hypocrite ; but we took 
him for a fanatic and hateful wrangler. We 
considered these Puritans as gloomy madmen, 
shallow brains and full of scruples. Let us quit 
our French and modern ideas and enter into these 
souls ; we shall find in them something else 
than hypochondria, namely, a grand sentiment. 
Am I a just man ? and if God who is perfect 
justice were to judge me at this moment what 
sentence would he pass upon me ? Such is the 
original idea of the Puritans, and through them 
came the revolution in England. We laugh at 
a revolution about surplices and chasubles ; there 
was a sentiment of the divine underneath all 
these disputes of vestments. Those poor folk, 
shop-keepers and farmers, believed with all their 
hearts in a sublime and terrible God, and the 
manner how to worship him was not a trifling 
thing for them. This has caused the revolution, 
and not the Writ of Ship-money, or any other 
political vexation." 



THOMAS CARLYLE. 39 

111 history, in novels, and in poetry the Puri- 
tan of the seventeenth century has often been 
depicted ; his picture, that of the sinister hypo- 
crite, is distinctly impressed on us ; but of the 
royalist churchman of the Charles II. type, we 
have no accurate portrait. The extreme Puritan 
we know ; but of the extreme political defenders 
of the church who cared nothing for religion, 
who were compelled to swear belief to the doc- 
trines of the church before securing a seat in 
Parliament, or admission to the court, royalist 
writers have given us only imperfect pictures. 
It was the church establishment, and not Chris- 
tianity, for which these conformists cared. 

Perhaps Mr. Rees, who was one of a com- 
mittee who waited on Lord Thurlow, minister of 
George III., to ask for the repeal of the Corpora- 
tion and Test Act may give us a correct idea of 
them: "Gentlemen," said Lord Thurlow, "I am 
against you, by God. I am for the established 
church, d — n me. Not that I have any more re- 
gard for the established church than for any 
other church, but because it is established. And 
if you could get your d — d religion established, 
I'll be for that too." 

In the time of Charles II., wdien a man could 
not be a custom-house officer unless he was a 



40 THOMAS CARLYLE. 

churchman, there must have been Thurlows ; but 
they have not been described, like the Puritans, 
as unworthy members of society. It is unfair 
to keep Praise God Barebones in sight, and hide 
the Thurlows who were conformists. Outside 
the court, in the country towns and villages, 
during the seventeenth century, true piety was 
about equally shared by the Puritans and church- 
men. The homes of John Howe and George 
Herbert were not unlike. 



CHAPTER III. 



EARLY LIFE. 



It has been said that for Oliver's boyhood there 
is " nothing but unlimited conjecture and most 
dubious legend ; " and Carlyle tells us that the 
boy " went through the universal destinies which 
conduct all men from childhood to youth, in a 
way not particularized by an authentic record." 
But there is one authentic record which even 
Carlyle's careful search did not secure. In the 
parish book which records the baptism of Oliver 
is also a notice of his having been subjected to 
some sort of ecclesiastical discipline at the age of 
seventeen, for an offense which lie had committed. 
What the offense was is not indicated, but it 
probably was connected in some way with the 
church or its services. The date of the record is 
a little — perhaps a year — before the time when 
41 



42 EARLY LIFE. 

Laud was made Archdeacon of Huntingdon, his 
first promotion ; and it is not unlikely, trained 
as Oliver had been by his parents and by his 
schoolmaster, Dr. Beard, a Low Churchman, 
that he manifested some dislike of changes which 
he noticed in the manner of conducting the ser- 
vices, or in the chancel arrangements of the 
church. 

Perhaps Oliver had not an appreciating eye 
for the new ecclesiastical garments which were 
then coming into fashion, or perhaps he did not 
like to see the communion table to which his 
mother had become accustomed changed and 
made into an altar ; and, boy-like, was a little 
imprudent in speech or actions. We do not 
know, and we never shall know, what the trouble 
was, or what the punishment was ; but the record 
stands, and has stood for nearly three hundred 
years, on the parish book, telling that Oliver had 
done something wrong; and as this is the only 
indication of the kind connected with his life, 
the only proof adverse to his good character, it 
can do his memory no special harm to mention 
it here. 

Oliver was born in Huntingdon, a small ham- 
let about fifteen miles from Cambridge, on the 
twenty-fifth of April, 1599. The house in which 



EARLY LIFE. 43 

he spent his early days is still standing, but it 
has been much changed. His family, at the time 
of his birth, was not an obscure one. His father 
and three of his uncles had sat in the Parliaments 
of Queen Elizabeth. A royalist uncle, Oliver's 
godfather, who lived in the great, and even then, 
historical house, called Hinchinbrook, only half 
a mile from Oliver's home, was so prominent a 
man that King James nearly ruined him, finan- 
cially, by his visits. The Hinchinbrook mansion 
still remains, and its external appearance is now 
much as it was three hundred years ago. 

Besides the uncle, Sir Oliver, the boy had 
many relatives who were prominent in English 
society. One of his aunts was Mrs. Hampden, 
the mother of John Hampden, who was a great 
man, and at one period of his life the most talked 
of, and the most revered, of all the men in Eng- 
land. The social position, then, of Oliver's family 
was that of the English gentry, between the 
nobility and the yeomanry ; his relations were 
people of property, education and good breeding. 
But "better than all social rank," Oliver's father 
" is understood to have been a wise, devout, stead- 
fast and worthy man ; and to have lived a modest 
and manful life." Even in " Cromwelliana," we 
read that Mr. Robert Cromwell was " a gentleman 



44 EARLY LIFE. 

who went no less in esteem and reputation than 
any of his ancestors for his personal worth, until 
his unfortunate production of his son and heir ; " 
and of Oliver's mother it is only necessary here 
to say that she imparted to her son some of her 
own good qualities, that she deeply loved her son, 
and that Oliver tenderly watched over her from 
the time when she became a widow in 1617, till, 
in 1654, she died in Whitehall Palace at the 
age of ninety-four. 

His parents were religious after the Puritan 
type, and from them he doubtless first learned 
that Bible language which clung to him through 
life, and which in his use of it was not cant, but 
the simplest and most natural form of speech. 
Oliver received his home-training at a time when 
a Puritan was what the name indicates; when 
the name was one of reproach ; when it suggested 
persecution, and when there was no advantage to 
be gained in being a hypocrite under it. There 
were but few, if any, hypocritical Puritans before 
the time of the Long Parliament, forty-one years 
after he was born ; there were many of them when 
Puritanism became a power in the government, 
and a title to favor and rewards. 

Oliver, too, in that Huntingdon home, in ad- 
dition to his religious training, was securing a 



EARLY LIFE. 45 

political education (for religion and politics were 
identical in those days) from the time that he 
began to think at all seriously on any subject. 
The talks at the fireside were of the atrocities 
of Elizabeth's reign ; of the emigrants, sixty to 
seventy thousand of them who, driven by the 
persecutions of Philip II. and of Alva, had settled 
within fifty years in the eastern counties of Eng- 
land ; of that ecclesiastical farce, the Hampton 
Court Conference, which gave King James so 
much sport, and which gave the Puritans so 
much disappointment and distress ; of the Span- 
ish fleet, the Armada, which, a few years before 
his birth, had been sent for the purpose of con- 
quering the country and forcing it to become 
Roman Catholic ; of the attempt to blow up the 
Parliament House and all the Protestants in it ; 
of the stabbing by Jesuits, in Paris, of Henry, 
one of the Protestant champions of the day; of 
King James's claim to " absolute sovereignty," 
his claim to " freedom from all control by law," 
his claim to passive obedience as a religious obli- 
gation, binding on all his subjects, his claim to 
" the power to alter the religion " of men and 
women, as the representative of the Almighty, 
and to do this sacred work with shears and 
branding irons, where sermons failed ; to do this 



46 EARLY LIFE. 

in behalf of the court of Heaven, when the orgies 
of the court at Whitehall were the scorn and 
derision of all Puritans. 

Talks about these matters Oliver often listened 
to in the Huntingdon home before he reached the 
age of twenty. These talks, and the abundant 
pamphlets of the time, gave him his early politi- 
cal training ; and two years after he was twenty, 
when a farmer, he was looking after his cows 
and sheep, leading a quiet peaceful life, his politi- 
cal education was supplemented by learning that 
the patriots of the Parliament of 1621, all of 
whom were loyal to the government, had failed 
in their object to control taxation, and to secure 
the "privilege of free discussion ;" that the king 
had been to the Parliament House, and with his 
own hand had torn from the statute-book the 
record of their votes, and had sent a message to 
the members forbidding them to inquire into the 
mysteries of State. It is conceivable that Oliver's 
thoughts, when news of these things reached him, 
were not limited to his cattle ; it is probable that 
his mind expanded not a little politically when 
he heard of the royal doings in the Parliament 
of 1G21. 

The reader must not for a moment suppose 
that we have been drawing a fancy picture. It is, 



EARLY LIFE. 47 

and must be, a true picture even in its minutest 
details. Dr. Beard, Oliver's teacher when a 
boy, as well as his adviser in youth, besides be- 
ing- a reader of books, and a publisher of books, 
was a sharp-sighted man, ready for political or 
any other useful talk. He had his eyes wide 
open. He knew what was going on. Seven 
years after the time of which we have been 
speaking, when Oliver went up to London to 
sit as member in the Parliament of 1628, Dr. 
Beard had his eye on him, and furnished him 
with the subject of his first parliamentary speech. 
It is impossible that the boy and the young man 
should have escaped the education on politics 
which we have noted, with such a man as Dr. 
Beard at his side, shut up in a little village like 
Huntingdon. 

The home of Oliver's boyhood was a pleasant 
one. Through the grounds about it flowed a 
brook, which is suggestive of sport, though we 
are not sure that it contained trout. The fens 
abounded in game. There was nothing particu- 
larly interesting in the scenery, but the surround- 
ings of Hinchinbrook were attractive. The walk 
to the grand old hou°e of his uncle and godfather 
could be taken within a few minutes. Oliver's 
father had an income, it is reported, of about 



48 EAKLY LIFE. 

five thousand dollars a year, and his mother had 
about one thousand dollars a year, reckoning 
money at its present value. There was probably 
no lack of such comforts as were found in the 
houses of the gentry. He had no brother, but 
he had six sisters who grew to womanhood, two 
of whom married colonels ; one married a general, 
and a fourth, after the death of her first husband, 
who was a doctor, married another doctor who 
became a bishop. These facts tell in favor of 
Oliver's sisters, and indicate that the family was 
not an obscure one. With these sisters the boy 
must have learned to sing, for in later life he 
sang in the midst of battle ; and in quiet hours, 
when such came, he sang in the palace of 
Whitehall. 

To the stories of royalists, that when a boy he 
stole apples out of orchards and that he fought 
with other boys, stories grounded on " human 
stupidity and Carrion Heath," Carlyle gives 
Christian burial. The probability is, that, with 
such a mother as he had, and with his many 
sisters, he was not, as represented in history, an 
evil-minded boy. The face, made from a cast 
taken after death, is a noble one — even beautiful 
when long looked at ; and though poets, in the 
Stuart interest, found a subject for their rhyme 



EARLY LIFE. 49 

in his prominent red nose, it is pleasant to 
believe that the face of the youth was not at all 
ill-looking. 

One thing certainly can be put to Oliver's 
credit, his intimate connection, far into man- 
hood, with the teacher of his boyhood. Most 
fortunate were his relations to Dr. Beard. The 
doctor grounded him in Latin and prepared him 
for Cambridge ; but, as we have seen, he gave 
hi in another education, one that was to leave its 
effects on the history of England. Oliver se- 
cured enough Latin to enable him to talk in that 
language, but it is reported that he did not 
talk very well. It is not improbable that Dr. 
Beard awakened in him a love for books, and 
tliat he laid the foundation of his fine library 
while yet a farmer of Huntington and St. Ives. 
It is certain that long after the school days were 
over, scholar and teacher were often together, and 
they seem to have acted in concert. 

The doctor was a Puritan, but Puritans in his 
time, as before stated, were what the name implied. 
Sham Puritanism, thirty to forty years later than 
the years of which we are writing, was grim, sour, 
long-faced, whining ; not so that of Oliver's child- 
hood. The fact that Dr. Beard w r as a Puritan 
in Elizabeth's reign and in the first part of the 



50 EARLY LIFE. 

seventeenth century, carries with it the idea that 
he was a good, kind and truly Christian man. 
Since writing this sentence my eye falls on the 
following one in Green's History : " The lighter 
and more elegant sides of the Elizabethan culture 
harmonize well enough with the temper of the 
Puritan gentleman." 

The sports within the reach of Oliver in his 
boyhood, apart from fowling and fishing, were 
rather limited ; but it is known that foot-ball was 
within his compass. The game played then in 
Huntingdon was not, indeed, what the game is 
to-day. It was not so scientific. No report of 
scores was sent over England. Cambridge and 
Oxford professors did not watch the results with 
any special interest. But, in spite of detrac- 
tions, the boy enjoyed his foot-ball, and it must 
have been a trial, after he had learned the game, 
to find a competitor at Cambridge who could 
beat him. 

Mrs. Hutchinson says that Oliver was afraid 
of her husband ; but the only authentic record 
of Oliver's ever having had fear connects itself, 
not with Colonel Hutchinson, but with foot-ball. 
This record may be found in a late publication 
of " The Prince Society," Boston, by Charles H. 
Bell. " I remember the time," said the Lord 



EARLY LIFE. 



51 



Protector, " when T was more afraid of meeting 
John Wheelwright at foot-ball, than I have been 
since of meeting an army in the field, for I was 
infallibly sure of being tripped up by him." 
Any gleam of light on our hero is worth having, 
but these words are especially interesting in this 
foot-ball age. We have but little hope of awak- 
ening interest touching Oliver among scholars, or 
even of their reading our little book ; but per- 
haps foot-ball men will find interest in it just 
here, and by the year 1899 will have erected a 
marble foot-ball group, with Oliver and Wheel- 
wrioht in the center, to commemorate two chain- 

o 

pious of the seventeenth century. 

The great ruler, the Protector of New England, 
may be neglected ; it may be difficult to raise 
money enough even to buy a picture of the 
warrior, the statesman and the saint ; but con- 
nect his memory with foot-ball, and the difficulty 
would be overcome. We do not think the sug- 
gested monument would be the most desirable 
one for the perpetuation of Oliver's name ; but 
it would be better than nothing, and nothing 
have we yet in New England. 

One great attraction for Oliver, outside of his 
home, was the house of his uncle. The sumptu- 
osities of that house, which, of course, included 



52 EARLY LIFE. 

a good deal of eating and drinking, were sncli 
that they finally brought financial ruin to god- 
father Oliver, and compelled him to retire to a 
smaller and less expensive establishment far off 
in the fens. But the expenses and the shows 
were kept up all through Oliver's youth, and he 
had the full benefit of them. 

Pictures of Hinchinbrook mansion have lately 
been brought out in this country, showing the 
old Norman gateway, and a part of the old nun- 
nery : and the place is described as being now 
one of the loveliest of old English homes. Oli- 
ver's grandfather, Sir Henry Cromwell, " en- 
larged and as good as built " Hinchinbrook. He 
was called the Golden Knight because he spent 
and gave away so much money. He died in 
January, 1603, when Oliver was nearly four 
years old. The little boy saw " funeralia and 
crapes, saw father and uncles with grave faces, 
and understood not well what it meant ; under- 
stood only, or tried to understand, that the good 
old grandfather was gone away, and would never 
pat his head any more." 

Oliver's uncle and godfather succeeded Sir 
Henry at Hinchinbrook ; and a few months after 
establishing himself, he received a message from 
King James of Scotland, that on his journey to 



EARLY LIFE. 53 

London to take the crown, which Elizabeth's 
death had vacated, he would stop for a visit at 
the Hinchinbrook house. The king arrived about 
the last of April, lb'03, and remained as a guest 
for two days ; a short visit, but a good deal can 
be done in the matter of expense within a brief 
time when one has a king and his retinue to 
entertain. " Uncle Oliver, besides the ruinously 
splendid entertainments, gave James hounds, 
horses and astonishing gifts " . . . " in re- 
turn there were knights created, Sir Oliver the 
first of the batch we may suppose." 
" King James had decided that there should be 
no reflection for the want of knights." 

Let us take a glance into the big hall of the 
fine old house, and try to see what is going on 
there on the morning of April 28, 1603. Little 
Oliver is certain to be an early arrival. Noth- 
ing could keep him at home that morning. His 
good mother probably found it difficult to keep 
him quiet while she was arranging his cuffs and 
collar. There were no Barnum shows in that 
day at Huntingdon, and to see the gorgeous 
king and his Scotch attendants, in their strange 
dresses and feathers, and the tables spread with 
all kinds of luxuries that could be had, was a 
chance for him not to be missed. Knighthood, 



54 EARLY LIFE. 

in the olden times of chivalry, had a significance ; 
it meant something when the receiver of it had 
" won his spurs ; " and in late times, men who 
have become distinguished by doing something 
worth doing, rightly have the honor conferred on 
them; but the chief use of knighthood in King 
James's time, appears to have been to get money 
to eke out the royal revenue. 

Sir Oliver had done nothing to entitle him to 
a garter or a ribbon, but the king knew that he 
was rich and was disposed to make presents. 
Later on the king directly sold the title of " Sir ; " 
but it is not likely that he began that sort of 
trade on the occasion of this visit, and before 
he was crowned. He secured his pay out of Sir 
Oliver indirectly — by visits at Hinchinbrook, by 
receiving gifts — until at last the knight became 
so reduced in income that he was compelled to 
sell Hinchinbrook to one of the Montagues ; the 
Montagues still hold the place. Hume tells us, 
and for such a statement he is credible, that 
James brought with him from Scotland a great 
number of Scottish courtiers, and that as he 
passed along all ranks of men flocked about 
him from every quarter. The nobility, of course, 
came to Hinchinbrook with their best clothes and 
ornaments, adding to the interest of the spectacle. 



EARLY LIFE. 55 

Oliver, when lie became a man, was indifferent 
about dress, in fact, laid himself open to criti- 
cism for appearing in Parliament in a shabby 
suit made by a country tailor ; but the brilliant 
dresses in his uncle's hall must have delighted 
him, especially the Scottish ones. But the grand 
sight was the knighting. The king, in all his 
glory of adornment, surrounded by the glitter- 
ing crowd, had kneeling at his feet the subjects 
who henceforth were to belong to a noble order 
which could be traced far back of the Plantag- 
enets into dim antiquity. It is to be regretted 
if Uncle Oliver did not secure for his godson a 
good position where he could see all that was 
going on ; if, however, Oliver, at the age of four, 
had any of the persistency which marked his 
later life, he did not need his uncle's help. 

It rather detracts from the value and dignity 
of James's knights to know, as we do from his- 
tory, that he made more than two hundred of 
them before he had been in England six months ; 
but, happily, it was not known at Hinchinbrook, 
when he was there, that he would belittle the 
honor by the profusion of his favors. Queen 
Elizabeth had been blamed for making so few 
knights ; James, it was soon thought, had made 
too many. 



56 EARLY LIFE. 

Royalists have related that in the following 
year, 1604, little Prince Charles, then four years 
old, on his way from Scotland to London was 
taken to Hinchinbrook ; that the two boys met 
there and got into a quarrel in which Oliver 
gave the Prince a bloody nose. This is the 
tradition. Probably the bo} r s met, played to- 
gether, may have quarreled, but there is no 
evidence to be found relating to this matter. 
Royalists must have been short of material 
adverse to Oliver when they jmt this report into 
English history. 

Historians have written not a little, in order 
to put a mark of disgrace on Cromwell, in con- 
nection with the brewing business. Brewer is a 
common title of the Protector, even now, and 
especially here in New England. The earliest 
Stuart writer on this matter says that he was not 
f brewer, that the brewing was done by his father. 
There is not, however, the least proof that the 
father carried on brewing as a business. The 
income of the family, six thousand dollars a year, 
would indicate that selling beer was not the 
source of so large a revenue. There was no tea 
or coffee in Huntingdon or in England during 
Robert Cromwell's life ; beer was a universal 
drink, and it is probable that a thrifty farmer 



EARLY LIFE. 57 

would convert a part of his grain into that 
beverage. 

In the year 1617, King James is again at 
Hinchinbrook. He is on his way to Scotland. 
His object is to get his Scottish bishops to be 
reverenced and financially supported by Presby- 
terian Calvinists who hated the mere name of 
bishop. Dr. Laud, then king's chaplain and 
also Archdeacon of Huntingdon, is with him. Sir 
Oliver's purse is now " growing lank," and Robert 
Cromwell, at his house near by, is sick and not 
far from death. Oliver has been studying for a 
year at Cambridge, in Sidney-Sussex College, the 
focus of Puritanism. Probably he was at home 
at the time of the royal visit, but if at home he 
would not seek to see the king or the archdeacon ; 
sad to tell, it is doubtful if the uncle would care 
to see his godson. It was inevitable that they 
should separate. Sir Oliver was a devoted loyal- 
ist ; Oliver was already so imbued with Puritan- 
ism, and so well informed of the character and 
of the government of the king, that intercourse 
between his uncle and himself could hardly be 
agreeable. 

The after story is a very dismal one, and it is 
all comprehended in a few bare cold facts of 
history. Not a letter now extant alludes to it ; 



58 EARLY LIFE. 

not a writer can tell it in its particulars. That 
Oliver suffered, that he suffered keenly at the 
estrangement, even into the time of the Protec- 
torate, into which his uncle lived, his general 
character, his humane feelings compel us to be- 
lieve ; that the uncle was overwhelmed, sorrow 
stricken, at what he deemed the disgraceful dis- 
loyalty of his nephew, cannot for a moment be 
doubted. 

What a scene, that at Eamsey, off in the fens, 
soon after the war broke out. The uncle was 
living there, " having burned out his splen- 
dors " at Hinchinbrook, and Oliver, now Captain 
Cromwell, is compelled by his duty to the Parlia- 
ment to search his house for arms, which might, 
if not secured, be sent to the king at York. 
The old books say that Captain Cromwell stood 
" uncovered " in the presence of his uncle while 
the search was going on ; what they said, what 
they thought, no one can ever know. Friend- 
ships were broken, families were torn asunder 
in the civil war ; but there was no sadder sight 
than that at Ramsey, when Sir Oliver Crom- 
well saw standing before him with uncovered 
head, the Parliament officer at whose christening 
in infancy he had stood as godfather. 

One or two more facts will bring us to the 



EARLY LIFE. 59 

farming life of our hero. His father died in 1617, 
and he at once left Cambridge. He returned to 
his home to live with his mother, and to take the 
care of the estate. Royalist writers say, that the 
" blade," in early life, wasted his time and prop- 
erty in dissipation, but there is no proof offered 
by them, and the known facts of his life are 
certainly against this theory. Some months after 
his father's death he went to London, probably to 
get such knowledge of law as would be useful to 
a citizen, and there he is married to Elizabeth 
Bourchier, to whom, thirty years later, he could 
write, " Thou art dearer to me than any crea- 
ture." A record of the marriage now stands in 
the old registry of St. Giles's Church, Cripple- 
gate. The time was August, 1620. It was the 
month when the Mayflower, in the harbor of 
Southampton, took on board the pilgrims who 
were to land at Plymouth. He soon took his 
wife to Huntingdon, and there, in the same house 
with his mother, begins his life as a farmer. 



CHAPTER IV. 



FARMER. 



To make Oliver Cromwell visible as a farmer, 
with only four of his letters to throw light on his 
farming life, is not an easy thing to do ; and yet, 
some attempt to portray him in that character 
is suggested by the little that is known of his 
twenty years of life in that occupation. Some 
conception of his surroundings, of his lands, of 
his duties and cares, may be derived from en- 
cyclopaedias, and from Carlyle's descriptions ; and 
not a little may be inferred from what Doctor 
William Elliot Griffis has written in "The 
Influence of the Netherlands in the Making of 
the English Commonwealth, and the American 
Republic." 

Oliver spent ten years as a farmer in his home 
of Huntingdon, six years at St. Ives, which was 
60 



FATTIER. 61 

only five miles away, and four years at Ely, a 
cathedral town, which was also but a short dis- 
tance from his early home. 

There were influences about him, through all 
these twenty years, which tended to the formation 
of a thoughtful and strong character. He lived 
through these years in that part of England (in 
one of the eastern counties) where lived nearty 
all the great English patriots of the early part of 
the seventeenth century, and where were born 
most of those emigrants who fled from James I. 
and Charles I. to New England. Going over the 
meadows and through the bogs with his branding- 
iron, which the Rev. Mark Noble says was in 
existence in his day, and which would be better 
worth seeing now than any crown which kings 
have worn, this young man, Oliver, was learning 
something all the time outside of his farming 
operations ; and in his hours of leisure he came 
in contact with not a few of the great men who 
were beginning a work which was to end in the 
extinction of those imperial " shining jewels," 
the " Star Chamber," and the " High Commission 
Courts," and in the overthrow of an oppressive 
Government. 

He was twenty years old when he began his 
farming life ; he was forty- one when he quitted 



62 FARMER. 

it. Among the men with whom he consorted, 
during this period of his life, and who were lead- 
ers on the side of liberty, were some of his own 
relations. 

Sir William Masham, " a busy man in the 
politics of his time," was a cousin. St. John, 
the celebrated ship-money lawyer, who defended 
Hampden in the great lawsuit of 1637, was mar- 
ried to one of his cousins. Hampden himself, 
whose statue now stands in St. Stephen's Hall, 
" to represent the noblest type of the Parlia- 
mentary opposition," was the son of his father's 
sister. With these men, and others like them, he 
associated, and from them he learned of what 
was going on at the court and in the country. 

When Philip II. of Spain, in the year 1567, 
with a few strokes of his pen doomed to death 
from eighty to one hundred thousand inhabitants 
of the Netherlands, he little foresaw all the results 
of that decision. He little dreamed that Alva's 
work would sow the seeds of liberty on the 
eastern shores of England, and that those seeds 
would, within a century, be scattered beyond the 
Atlantic on a continent which would one day more 
than rival his South American dominions. Yet 
such was the fact. Dr. Griffis has demonstrated 
that fact, and the present writer will take the 



FARMER. 63 

liberty to use some of his statements. He says 
that before the end of Alva's rule between eighty 
and one hundred thousand persons found a home 
in England ; that most of these refugees settled 
in the eastern counties ; that they made great 
changes there ; that they introduced table vege- 
tables and the cultivation of winter roots, which 
were unknown before they came ; that they 
drained the fens and taught the people to culti- 
vate the land ; that to these Dutchmen, who, in 
all kinds of cultivation and in all kinds of knowl- 
edge, " in the fine arts, music, civic architecture, 
painting, science, learning, agriculture, inventions, 
organized industries, navigation, finance, political 
science," were far superior to the English, may 
be traced influences which, in no small degree, 
led to changes, not only in the industrial, but in 
the political and religious conditions of the coun- 
try. Under the industry of these Hollanders 
" the fens of Eastern England became a garden," 
and Dr. Griffis claims that nearly all the polit- 
ical institutions peculiarly American came out of 
Holland and not out of England. 

Cromwell, during his farmer life, could not 
fail to have association and close intercourse with 
these Dutch settlers. He probably knew some 
of the earlier refugees, for Alva continued his 



64 FARMER. 

destructive work for nearly twenty years — until 
1573 — when he returned to Philip, and was able 
to report that, besides those whom he had slain in 
battle, there were eighteen thousand whom his 
" Court of Blood " had executed, and that there 
were about one hundred thousand who had left 
the country and gone into exile. Not only is it 
certain that Oliver knew many of these Dutch 
refugees, but it is probable that he employed 
some of them on his lands. The same sympathy 
which led him, when Protector, to watch over 
persecuted Protestants abroad, would lead him 
to give aid to those who had been compelled, in 
exile, to seek employment. 

Manj^of these refugees were learned men, hold- 
ing views about government and freedom of 
which Englishmen, in Elizabeth's time and later, 
had no conception ; it is not at all improbable 
that Oliver, the farmer, acquired, in no small 
degree from them, that knowledge and that spirit 
which led him, later on in life, when the Euro- 
pean world was clamoring for the divine right of 
kings, to become the advocate and the supporter 
of the divine right of the people. 

It is a fact well proved that this farmer's ac- 
tivities were not confined to the cultivation of his 
lands or the care of his cattle. It is proved that 



FARMER. 05 

he was not a selfish accumulator. It is proved 
that his heart went out toward those in distress. 
He was known in his day as the friend of the 
poor. There are, indeed, but four letters which 
remain to throw light on these twenty years, but 
it happens that two of the four letters relate ex- 
clusively to charities, one written in the interest 
of a clergyman, and the other in the interest of 
a poor old sick man; and it happens, too, that 
the third letter asks the person to whom it is 
addressed to put a certain gentleman in mind 
" to do what he can for the poor cousin I did 
solicit him about." Now, when three out of four 
extant letters are of this sort, it may be inferred 
that kind deeds were done all through the farm- 
ing life. Few modern philanthropists, can show 
such good proportionate records as Oliver, in the 
matter of charity letters and charity works. 

The reader will mark that these three letters 
were written voluntarily ; that they came naturally 
out of his warm and generous heart. The fourth 
of the letters, all that are left of the twenty years 
of farming life, is the first of his extant letters, 
and a notable one ; it is embraced in the chapter 
on " Letters." 

It would be interesting to know just what kind 
of a farmer Oliver was, how much he worked 



6'6 FARMER. 

himself ; how much labor he got out of his boys, 
Richard and Henry ; how he lived as to his table ; 
how he dressed ; if the Dutch taught him to have 
a vegetable garden, a rare luxury in England, 
then ; if he made a financial success with his 
cows and sheep, but these things and many 
others we shall never know about. Almost the 
only light from these farms comes to us through 
the charity letters. Still, it is pleasant for the 
present writer to think that he was a rather suc- 
cessful farmer. He knows that when Oliver went 
up to the Parliament of 1640, which was the end 
of his farming life, he had money, and enough 
of it to enable him to subscribe largely to the 
war fund, although the Eev. Dr. South intimates 
that his hat and coat were not paid for. 

The early Stuart historians would lead their 
readers to believe that Oliver was rather a fail- 
ure as a farmer ; that he was not a wise and pru- 
dent farmer ; that he spent altogether too much 
time in praying when he should have been looking 
after his idle men in the fields, who were taking 
advantage of his piety in recreation ; if so, he 
was a remarkable specimen of a hypocrite, wast- 
ing money thus on his laborers. These old 
royalist writers are sometimes very funny, and 
are often inconsistent. These writers' elucidations 



FARMER. 67 

of Oliver are as much at variance as the pictured 
caricatures which have come down to us from the 
old engravers. 

At one time during his farmer life, Oliver 
emerged from obscurity and acquired the name, 
or nickname, of " Lord of the Fens." The drain- 
age of the fens meant the carrying of the water 
of the river Ouse twenty miles direct to the sea, 
and the prevention of its overflowing large por- 
tions of the country. It was a great work for 
those times, and promised to make cultivable 
lands that were useless. The idea of it, most 
likely, came from the Dutch. The work was 
nearly completed, when the king, in council, at- 
tempted to do a public injustice in regard to it. 
Thereupon a great meeting was held in Hunting- 
don, farmers coming to it from the surrounding 
country ; and at the meeting Oliver opposed the 
interference of the king, when that " operation 
of going in the teeth of the royal will was some- 
what more perilous than it would be now." He 
got into trouble about the business, and for a 
short time was deprived of his liberty. In his 
" History of the Rebellion," Lord Clarendon 
refers to this matter, and more than intimates 
that Oliver, in a conference with him about it, 
showed a good deal of temper. This is quite 



68 FARMER. 

credible. Farmers living on boggy wet lands 
are inclined to secure drainage ; and if a king, 
or any one else, interferes with a sluice way or 
canal for carrying off excess of water, it would 
certainly be natural to show anger. 

It is evident from what occurred in connec- 
tion with this Huntingdon meeting of citizens, 
were there no other evidence, and from the title 
which Oliver secured, that he was an active and 
prominent man among his farmer neighbors ; and 
probably no better councilor or magistrate, or 
more just justice of the peace could be found in 
the region where he lived. 

The reader has already discovered that only a 
little can be told of the twenty years of farming ; 
but that what is discoverable indicates a man dis- 
charging his duties in a manful way, leading a 
quiet, unnoticed life, growing grass and raising 
cattle. "We have before us a stout, able-bodied 
Puritan, who reads his Bible, says his prayers, 
goes to church, has children born to him, has 
them baptized, leads an inoffensive, humble life ; 
does his duty as to charity, interferes with what 
he thinks is wrong about fen drainage ; looks 
after his mother, his wife and little children ; 
and learns, though a farmer, what he can of what 
is going on in England, and all this without a 



FARMER. 69 

thought of the wonderful future which lies before 
him. Many a time, striding over those bogs of 
Huntingdon and St. Ives, this farmer reflected 
on the oppressed condition of his country ; but 
it is doubtful if he had then any heroic thoughts 
or had one glimpse of future greatness. Duty, 
in his narrow sphere, was all. Had he ambition 
to become a leader, had he nurtured such a wish 
in those quiet pastures, years would not have 
passed after he entered Parliament without some 
demonstration of that desire. 

When first he enters on public life he is but 
a plain farmer and a gentleman. He has, indeed, 
his thoughts on the political problems of his day, 
but he is no statesman ; he has no plans, he has 
no thought except to give his votes on the side 
of freedom from oppression, and liberty for those 
enslaved. Circumstances made him. Acts of 
others — Eliot, Pym, Hampden — yes, royalists 
too ; Falkland, Wentworth and others, created 
the conditions which brought him into notice, 
and which finally led him to offer his service 
to his country in the humblest position which a 
gentleman could hold, without a title and without 
a sword. 

It was in the second year of Oliver's residence 
at St. Ives — 1632 — that Sir John Eliot, an 



70 FARMER. 

acquaintance and probably a friend, died in the 
Tower. The Parliament of 1G28 contained many 
great statesmen, but there were among them 
none who in genius, in power of using language, 
in loftiness of purpose, and devotion to his coun- 
try surpassed this great orator. The fragments 
of his speeches, which can now be read, indicate 
a man of superior ability, and a patriot inflexible 
in his purpose to reform the Government. He 
was one of those who, with "Went worth, then on 
the side of the people, framed the " Petition of 
Right," asking that no taxes be raised without 
the consent of Parliament, and that no freeman 
shall be imprisoned for refusing to pay taxes im- 
posed by the king alone ; and, on the last day of 
the sitting, he spoke against yielding to the un- 
just demands of James. 

A few days after the dissolution of the Parlia- 
ment, he and others were summoned to appear 
before the king's council, and after examination 
were committed to prison. All but Eliot after a 
time were set at liberty, not b}^ mercy, but rather 
from fear, warnings of trouble in the country 
having reached the king. Eliot's appeals were 
unavailing. He remained in the Tower for four 
years, until 1632, and a few weeks after asking 
for temporary release, on account of his impaired 



FARMER. 71 

health, telling His Majesty at the same time that 
he was sorry to have displeased him, he died 
there, a martyr to the cause of English liberty. 
Eliot was not a Puritan ; he was simply the ad- 
vocate of a government for the people, and not 
for the exclusive use and benefit of the kin?. 

Oliver was a member, a farmer member, of 
that Parliament of 1628 ; he doubtless heard 
the speeches made by Eliot, and after the Par- 
liament was ended he had eleven years, up to 
the Parliament of 1640, to reflect upon them. 
They were speeches not to be forgotten. Many 
years have passed since the present writer read 
them, but the impressions which they left have 
not been effaced. What, then, must have been 
their effect on one who heard them, and was an 
observer and an actor in the politics of the time ! 

Children wfire born to Oliver during the years 
covered, 1 h needless here to record 

\eir nan 





yea 1 -lence 

c 




Wv, fen 1 


1. 


"other, has made „ 


he. 


no longer watch over ^^ 


the L 


s, or walk through the narrow 


lanes, *. 


»nks of the black river Ouse. 



72 FARMER. 

He becomes a resident of a cathedral town. 
u His mother appears to have joined him at Ely ; 
she quitted Huntingdon, returns to her native 
place, an aged grandmother, was not, however, 
to end her days there." 

Dagdale, one of the old vituperative writers, 
has an account of Oliver's joining in an attempt, 
in a court of law, to get lunacy proved against 
this uncle and to deprive him of the management 
of his property. The story of this " act of vil- 
lany " on Oliver's part is no more credible than 
Dr. Bates's surgical operation story, which has 
been related in another chapter. The court, 
Dugdale says, decided against Oliver, and the 
uncle continued to manage his own property. 
Sir Thomas Steward was a lunatic, if after such 
treatment from his nephew he made him his chie E 
heir, which he did. 

These royalist aspersions, so often referred I 
it may be are getting' to be wen 1 ' 
reader ; but the writer feels cor 
Stuart historians, so far a- -id 

fair showing. The reprodui marges 

which they brought against Croi . would be 
indeed unbecoming. We .o concealment 

except where it is necessai^. It is due to 
Oliver's memory that the views of his contem- 



FARMER. 73 

poraries, and of such later adverse writers as we 
have room for, should be distinctly brought out 
in this book. We therefore quote from " Crom- 
welliana," a passage alluded to before, relating 
to this Steward property, and which reflects in 
other particulars on Oliver's character. " This, 
our Oliver," says the remarkable book, which 
contains extracts from more than a hundred 
newspapers, published during the civil wars, 
"this, our Oliver, was of Mr. Robert Cromwell, 
a gentleman who went no less in esteem and 
reputation than any of his ancestors, for his per- 
sonal worth, until his unfortunate production of 
this his son and heir, whom he had by his wife 
Elizabeth Steward, a niece of Sir Thomas Steward, 
a gentleman of competent fortune in this county, 
but of such a malignant effect on the course of 
this his nephew's life, that, if all the lands he 
gave him (as some were fenny ground) had 
been irrecoverably lost, it might have passed for 
a good Providence, and happy prevention of 
those ruins he caused in the three kingdoms. 
For that estate continued him here, after his de- 
bauchery had wasted and consumed his own 
patrimony, and diverted him from a resolution 
of going into New England, the Harbour of non- 
conformists, which design, upon his sudden and 



74 FARMER. 

miraculous conversion, first to a civil and relig- 
ious deportment, and thence to a sour puritanism 
he strait with abandoned ; by the former repent- 
ance he gained the good will and affection of the 
orthodox clergy, who, by their persuasions and 
charitable insinuations, wrought him into Sir 
Robert Steward's favor, insomuch that he de- 
clared him his heir to an estate of five hundred 
pounds a year ; by his second change to non- 
conformity and scrupulous sanctity, he gained 
the estimation and favor of the faction ; some of 
the heads whereof, viz., Mr. Hampden and Mas- 
ter Goodwin, procured him the match with a kins- 
woman of theirs, Mistress Elizabeth Boucher 
aforesaid, the daughter of Sir James Boucher ; 
and afterward got him chosen a burgess for 
Cambridge, by their interest in that town, which 
was totally infected with Puritanism and Zealotry, 
and this was his first projection and design of 
ambition, besides that it privileged him from 
arrests, his estate being sunk again, and not to 
be repaired but by the general ruin." 

AVe had copied this extract from " Cromwelli- 
ana" (published at Westminster, 1810), when to 
our joy we found that the passage was from Heath. 
This is our first sight of anything from Carrion 
Heath who, it will be remembered, Carlyle says 



FAEMER. 75 

was the chief fountain from which later historians 
drew their supplies. The passage is a curious 
one and suggests analyzing, but we let it stand 
without comment, so that the haters of Cromwell 
may have the full benefit of it. 

While living at Ely and still a farmer, at the 
age of thirty-nine, Oliver wrote a pious letter to 
his cousin, Mrs. St. John, in reply to a letter 
from her which evidently contained some rather 
flattering and pleasant expressions, called forth 
by a visit lately paid to her. Oliver writes : 
" Truly no poor creature hath more cause to put 
himself forth in the cause of God than I. I 
have had plentiful wages beforehand, and I am 
sure I shall never earn the least mite. The 
Lord accept me in his Son, and give me to walk 
in the light " . . . " blessed be his name 
for shining upon so dark a heart as mine. You 
know what my manner of life hath been. Oh ! 
I lived in and loved darkness, and hated the 
light. I was a chief, the chief of sinners. This 
is true, I hated godliness, yet God had mercy on 
me. Oh! the riches of his mercy." 

Carlyle thus comments on this letter : " Rev. 
Mark Noble, my reverend imbecile friend, dis- 
covers in this letter clear evidence that Oliver 
was once a very dissolute man ; that Carrion 



76 FARMER. 

Heath spake truth in that Flagellum balderdash 
of his. 0, my reverend imbecile friend ! had'st 
thou thyself never any moral life, but only a 
sensitive and digestive ? Thy soul never longed 
toward the serene heights, all hidden from thee, 
and thirsted as the hart in dry places, where no 
water be ? It was never a sorrow to thee that 
the eternal pole star had gone out, veiled itself 
in dark clouds ; a sorrow only that this or the 
other noble patron forgot thee when a living fell 
vacant." So much for Mark Noble,who brought 
out his book on Cromwell in 1787. 

Again : " O, modern reader ! dark as this letter 
may seem, I will advise thee to make an attempt 
toward understanding it. There is in it a tradi- 
tion of humanity worth all the rest. Indisput- 
able certificate that man once had a soul ; that 
man once walked with God, his life a sacred 
island girdled with the Eternities and Godheads. 
Was it not a time for heroes ? Heroes were then 
possible." . . " Yes, there is a tone in the 

soul of this Oliver that holds of the Perennial. 
With a noble sorrow, with a noble patience, he 
longs toward the mark of the prize of the high 
calling. He, I think, has chosen the better part." 
. " Annihilation of self " . . . " cast- 
ing yourself at the footstool of God's throne to 



FARMER. 77 

live or die forever ; as Thou wilt, not as I will." 
. . . " Brother,had'st thou never in any form 
such moments in thy history? Thou knowest 
them not even by credible rumor ? Well, thy 
earthly path was peaceabler, I suppose. But 
the highest was never in thee ; the highest will 
never come out of thee." 

The later domestic life of Oliver can be best 
told and understood, after we have related his 
career as a warrior and a ruler. 



CHAPTER V. 



WARRIOR. 



Carlyle collected the Cromwell letters and 
speeches, and made elucidations on them, with a 
view to a history of the English Revolution of 
the seventeenth century ; but he left his work as 
it now stands, a remarkable mixture ; conglom- 
erations such as no historian before him ever at- 
tempted, or, probably, in the future, ever will 
attempt ; a mixed mass, illuminated however, 
scintillated, we may say, by his unparalleled 
genius. 

On one page we have a picture of a battle, on 
the next page a letter from Oliver to his wife. 
Here we have a letter to a daughter, and in close 
proximity an account of the Irish war. Within 
a space of six pages we find a letter to " Dick 
Norton," a record of the king's execution, a 



WARRIOR. 79 

soldier's pass, a letter to Mayor about Richard's 
marriage, an order of the Council of State and 
a request for lending out some books from the 
St. James's Library. This want of arrangement 
makes it difficult to keep the historical parts of 
the work connected and clear in the mind ; but 
at the same time it gives a peculiar interest to 
the narrative. 

It has occurred to the writer, instead of follow- 
ing the plan of Carlyle's book, to separate the 
materials collected from it, and from other sources, 
and to make a chapter in connection with the 
civil war, to be followed by a chapter on Oliver's 
connection with the Parliament, and the offer of 
kingship. Oliver's place in Parliament was not 
prominent prior to the war ; and for that reason, 
too, it will be best to trace his course as a soldier 
before telling the story of his life^m connection 
with the Government. The two lives, that of a 
warrior and that of a statesman are, it is true, 
contemporaneous ; but a clearer view of the man 
will be secured by separating, in our account of 
him, his course in the war from his course in 
legislation. 

It has been remarked by an English historian, 
that the attempt of Charles I. to seize the five 
members of his Parliament for imprisonment, in 



80 WARRIOR. 

the year 1642, was undoubtedly the real cause of 
the civil war ; but this fatal action on the king's 
part was only the culmination of a tyranny which 
had long exasperated the people of England, and 
was rather the immediate occasion of the out- 
break than the real ground of it. 

The causes of the great contest may be traced 
far back into the reign of Queen Elizabeth ; they 
were augmented by the atrocities of the govern- 
ment of James I., and they became more and 
more intolerable during the eleven years when 
Charles I. governed the country without legisla- 
tion, violating his most sacred promises, and re- 
ducing his subjects to a condition of servitude, 
both as regards their political rights and their 
religious liberties. 

Opposition to the Government, through legisla- 
tion, was not attempted in the time of Henry 
VIII., though the Parliament met nearly every 
year ; and it was feeble all through the years of 
Elizabeth's rule in the few Parliaments which 
were called by this queen. In that of 1576, she 
gave the Commons to understand that she would 
rule the pulpits of the church, and she prohibited 
Puritan conventicles. But little effort was made 
to interfere with her prerogative; but at that 
early period there were complaints that a few 



WARRIOR. 81 

persons about the court were made rich at the 
expense of honest merchants who secured no 
royal favor. Puritanism broke out in the Parlia- 
ment of 1581, in the person of Paul Went worth, 
and his bill for a " Fast for the House," and " Ser- 
mons," was carried by a majority of fifteen ; but 
Elizabeth, the day after the passage of the bill, 
sent word that she did not approve of such pro- 
ceedings, and she called for the rescinding of the 
resolution. The Parliament yielded to her voice 
of authority. 

Froude tells us that the Episcopal Church 
might not have been saved but for the young 
Puritans ; that without the support of the Puritans 
Elizabeth would have " changed her palace for a 
prison, and her scepter for a distaff ; " that 
"through all her trials" (touching the Church 
of Rome) " they had been true as steel." But 
the time came, during her reign, when the Puri- 
tans were persecuted ; when Penry was hanged, 
and Udal condemned to die in prison. 

No strong opposition, however, was made 
against Elizabeth, nor was opposition to the 
Government in James's time at all commensu- 
rate with the injustice which marked the king's 
government. The day of triumph for the Puri- 
tans came at last ; and it came with vengeance : 



82 WARRIOR. 

with crime, according to the royalists, une- 
qualed in the annals of history; with a death- 
sentence passed on an anointed, sacred king ; 
came, said John Milton and other Puritans, said 
Cromwell and the fifty-eight judges with him, 
as an act of justice due to freemen, whose rights 
had been trampled on for fifty years and more, 
and as an act of mercy to future generations 
of Englishmen. 

It is pertinent here to say that Cromwell had 
hut little share with those who brought about the 
civil war. He took no part in the debates pre- 
ceding the time when Charles left Whitehall. 
The opposition of Eliot, Pym and others to the 
Government began long before he had a seat in 
St. Stephen's Hall. Though on committees, soon 
after the Parliament of 1640 met, there is no 
proof that he was looked on as a man who 
would be likely to take a prominent place in the 
affairs of the nation. His cousin Hampden 
knew what was in him, knew him to be a 
man of power ; but others were ignorant of 
that fact. When it was decided that there must 
be a war, he offered his services simply as a 
recruiting officer. 

One is inclined to wonder that patience and in- 
action lasted so long ; to wonder that resistance to 




OLIVER CROMWELL. 

{From ((portrait in the Lour,,.; 



WARRIOR. 83 



prerogative did not earlier take a more aggres- 
sive and violent form; that the Puritans, when 
Charles declared, soon after he was crowned, 
that Parliaments were wholly in his power, to be 
or not to be, did not attempt to hurl him from 
his throne. But the time was not yet ripe; it 
was needed that promise after promise should be 
violated ; that oppression should succeed oppres- 
sion ; that perfidy should again and again be 
followed by a semblance of repentance ; that the 
Star Chamber should overwhelm with terror, and 
then mutilate and imprison those whose only 
crimes were an aversion to ritualism, and the 
practice of a simple worship which they loved ; 
that the people should wait through long years 
of tyranny, until the king had entered St. 
Stephen's Hall with armed followers, to arrest 
members of the Commons, and had gone to 
York to raise an army to enforce his rights, or 
what he deemed his rights. And even then the 
Puritans did not begin the contest until efforts 
to bring back the king had failed ; and if at 
any time during the seven years which intervened 
between his leaving Whitehall and his death, 
three of which years were spent in war, while no 
small part of the remaining four were spent in 
negotiations, Charles had been willing to drop 



84 WARRIOR. 

the one word prerogative from his vocabulary, 
Puritans would have welcomed him to the throne. 
He began the war for prerogative, and for that 
only. The war transferred the Government to 
the Parliament, but the Government, after the 
king was completely beaten, still made earnest 
efforts to restore him, with an abated prerogative, 
Cromwell himself aiding ; bat duplicity, treachery, 
and clinging to prerogative, at last destroyed 
the monarchy, and changed England into a 
Commonwealth. 

It was on the sixth of January, 1642, that the 
abortive attempt to seize Pym, Hampden and 
others was made. Four days later the king left 
Whitehall, abandoning London and the Parlia- 
ment. It was now evident that civil war must 
come, and as soon as that was decided London 
began to supply the Parliament with funds. In 
that city, within a single day, four thousand men 
were enlisted to fight, if need be, against their 
king. Citizens offered their plate and women 
their jewelry. 

Six months pass before we hear of Cromwell. 
He does not appear until July. In that month 
" Mr. Cromwell " moves in the House of Com- 
mons "to allow the townsmen of Cambridge to 
raise two companies of volunteers, and to appoint 



WARRIOR. 85 

captains over them." The next month it appears 
that " Mr. Cromwell " has seized the magazine 
in the Castle of Cambridge, and hath hindered 
the carrying of the plate from the University for 
the service of the king. Before the month is 
ended he is Captain Cromwell ; captain of 
"Troup Sixty-seven." And now begins, at the 
age of forty-three, the life of our hero as a 
warrior. A farmer member of Parliament for 
the first time finds himself in military dress, 
with a sword, and expected to do a kind of work 
of which he is ignorant. 

A month later, on the twenty-third of October, 
he is in Edgehill battle. The battle decides noth- 
ing ; but while it is going on, Oliver makes a 
discovery which was to make him and the army, 
which he afterward commanded, world famous. 
He discovers that the soldiers with whom he had 
met the king's army were not of the kind which 
will bring success. The men on the royal side 
are men of honor, gentlemen who have a deep in- 
terest in the result ; the men secured on the side 
of the Parliament are "a set of poor tapsters," 
and " town apprentices." This will never do, 
he thinks ; and then he suggests to his cousin 
Hampden that men of religion, and men who 
have a conscientious interest in the issue of the 



86 WARRIOR. 

struggle, shall be enlisted. Hampden seems to 
see that the idea is a good one, but rather im- 
practicable. Oliver still thinks it is practicable. 
At any rate, he will try to put it into effect. He 
does try, and he succeeds. 

The army, which after a time he raises, 
becomes the most remarkable one to be found in 
the annals of Anglo-Saxon history ; the most 
memorable that ever fought an English battle. 
Cromwell could truly say, after it had done its 
work, that it was never beaten. It was made up 
chiefly of men of religion. No hard drinking 
was permitted in it; no oath could be heard 
without a fine. It was, perhaps, the first army 
in which violence to women after victory was 
unknown. It went into battle praying, and it 
sang the songs of David on the field in the 
intervals of slaughter. " The Lord of Hosts " 
was its battle-cry. It received and it deserved 
the name of Ironsides. It was an army which 
raised England to a position in Europe which 
before she had not held, and which she ceased 
to hold when the Protectorate was over. It not 
only crushed the armies of Charles I. and 
Charles II., but it was feared in France, in 
Spain, in Africa and at Rome. The mere dread 
of it arrested the awful slaughter of Protestants 



WARRIOR. 87 

by the Duke of Savoy in the valley of Lucerne ; 
stopped the regiments of Louis XIV. when on 
their march to Nismes to punish and expel the 
Huguenots of that city, and so frightened was 
the Pope that he started processions through the 
streets of Rome in order to avert its power. It 
made England unattackable, and the arbiter of 
European nations. 

During the winter of 1643-44, Oliver was 
employed in the eastern counties, in forming an 
association for defense ; a work which secured 
those counties all through the war from inva- 
sions of the royal army. In the month of 
March he receives the title of colonel ; and in 
the Fen country, with his regiment of horse, he 
stands ready to " disperse royalist assemblages, 
to keep down disturbance, and care in every way 
that the Parliament cause suffer no damage." 

In May he has a successful skirmish at Gran- 
tham, and soon after he raises the siege of 
Croyland. In July he wins a victory at Gains- 
borough ; performs " very gallant service," and 
reports thus: "The honor of this retreat" (of 
the enemy) " belongs to God." It was at this 
time that his name began to be talked about. 
Gainsborough was the beginning of " his great 
fortunes." In August the Earl of Manchester 



88 WARRIOR. 

accepts the control of the Eastern Association, 
and, a little later, Oliver became his second in com- 
mand. In October Cromwell was in the Winceby 
fight, and came near to death. His horse was 
killed, and he was thrown to the ground ; as 
he rose, he was attacked and ''knocked down" 
by a royalist. He regained his feet, mounted 
the horse of a soldier, made a charge, and 
routed the enemy. " My Lord of Manchester 
did not get up till the battle was over." 

In the early part of the next year, 1644, the 
Scots, seemingly not thankful to King Charles 
for what, with Archbishop Laud's help, he had 
done for them in the matter of bishops, entered 
England with an army of twenty thousand men 
to join the Parliament forces ; and, a few months 
later, " Prince Rupert, with some twenty thou- 
sand fierce men, came pouring over the hills 
toward York, where a royal force of six thou- 
sand men were besieged by these Scots, under 
Lesley, joined by the forces under Lords Fair- 
fax and Manchester, and Cromwell." 

We have now reached Marston Moor, and it 
is necessary to say that no attempt will be made 
to describe the battles in which our hero was 
engaged. We would hardly wish to retouch a 
painting made by a great master. As space 



WARRIOR. 89 

allows, limited quotations are made, but there 
will be no attempt to reproduce the pictures of 
Basing Hall and Dunbar, or other battle scenes 
which Carlyle has so graphically described. 

The battle of Marston Moor, " the bloodiest 
of the whole war," was fought July 2, 1644, be- 
tween seven and ten o'clock in the evening ; " the 
most enormous hurly-burly of fire and smoke 
and steel flashings and death tumult ever seen in 
those regions " — " four thousand one hundred 
and fifty bodies to be buried, and total ruin to the 
king's affairs in those northern parts." "The 
Prince of Plunderers " (Rupert), " invincible 
hitherto, here first tasted the steel of Oliver's 
Ironsides, and did not in the least like it." 
York was taken, and Rupert " fled across into 
Lancashire to recruit again." 

A few months later, on the twenty-seventh of 
October, came the second battle of Newbury, which 
was to produce a very important change in the 
management of the war. Manchester refused to 
follow the king when he was retiring from the field. 
The contest of four hours had terminated rather 
to the advantage of the Parliament army, and 
just that opportunity was presented which the 
Ironsides needed for a victory. Cromwell urged 
Manchester to give the order for an advance. 



90 WARRIOR. 

Manchester refused, and it became evident to 
Oliver that he was afraid of beating His Majesty 
thoroughly. Twelve days later, when the king 
was taking supplies into Denington Castle, Oliver 
urged his superior officer to permit an attack to 
be made. Again Manchester refused. About 
two weeks after this disagreement between these 
officers, on the twenty-fifth of November, Lieut.- 
Gen. Cromwell, in his place in Parliament, brought 
a charge against the earl, " that he hath always 
been indisposed and backward to engagements, 
and the ending of the war by the sword" — 
" that he hath drawn the army into, and detained 
them in such a position as to give the enemy 
fresh advantages." 

There was some talk of prosecuting Oliver ; 
but instead of lodging him in the Tower, the 
" Self Denying Ordinance " was passed, and a 
" New Model " for the army was made. This 
change called for the retirement of all officers 
who were members of the Parliament, including 
Cromwell, from military service ; but it was im- 
mediately seen that exceptions must be made, 
and Cromwell continued to hold a place as gen- 
eral. Sir Thomas Fairfax now became the 
superior officer, and " to him it is clear " that 
Oliver " cannot be dispensed with." Fairfax 



WARRIOK. 91 

and his officers petition Parliament that Oliver 
be retained, and the Commons, " somewhat more 
readily than the Lords, continued by installments 
of forty days, then of three months, his services 
in the army, and at length grew to regard him 
as a constant element there." "To Cromwell 
himself there was no overpowering felicity in 
getting out to be shot at, except where wanted ; 
he very probably, as Sprigge intimates, did let 
the matter in silence take its own course." To 
the present writer, no part of Cromwell's public 
life, so far as his pure and lofty character is in- 
volved, is more significant than that which is now 
before us. It was the highest kind of patriotism 
which led him to impeach Manchester, and to 
favor the expulsion from the army of all officers 
who were members of the Parliament. It was 
not only a dangerous thing, which counted but 
little with such a man, but it was a project which 
was not unlikely to retire him to a private life. 

The newspapers of the day, and the letters in 
" Cromwelliana," indicate more than the possi- 
bility of Oliver's excluding himself from the 
army and forever depriving himself of the oppor- 
tunity of becoming distinguished, and of losing, 
what loyalists say he from the first was aiming 
after, his own elevation to supreme power. 



92 WARRIOR. 

There is not space in this little book for an 
exposition of the famous " Self Denying Ordi- 
nance ; " but we quote from " Mercurius Brit- 
annicus " and from Fairfax in order to show how 
Fairfax and his officers felt in regard to the 
necessity of keeping Oliver for the successful 
prosecution of the war. 

The " Mercurius Britannicus " says : " It was 
ordered that Cromwell continue with the army 
three months, after the fifty days assigned him 
are expired. I cannot believe that any will re- 
pine at so necessary an order." The " Modern 
Intelligence " says, " It were to be wished he 
were in the army." Another report says, " The 
House fell into debate of that ever honored and 
thrice valiant and religious Lieut.-Gen. Cromwell, 
whose time, limited by both houses, is almost 
expired, and thereupon the House of Commons 
passed an ordinance for enlarging and adding the 
space of four months to continue his command 
as lieutenant-general, notwithstanding the ' Self 
Denying Ordinance,' and ordered to send to the 
Lords for their concurrence." Probably a letter 
from Fairfax settled this matter and secured 
Oliver as a permanent officer in the army. 

Fairfax wrote to the Parliament as follows : 
" The general esteem and affection which he 



WARRIOR. 93 

hath, both with the officers and soldiers of this 
whole army, his own personal worth and ability 
for the employment, his great care, diligence, 
courage and faithfulness in the services you have 
already employed him in make us look 

upon it as the duty we owe to you and the pub- 
lic, to make it our humble request and earnest 
wish ... to appoint him unto this employ- 
ment." This letter is more than a tribute to 
Cromwell ; it reflects, at the distance of more 
than two centuries, a beautiful light on Sir 
Thomas Fairfax, his officers and his soldiers. 

It is the view of Gardiner, the historian, 
that Oliver " supported the first Self Denying 
Ordinance with the real intention of abandoning 
his position in the army." 

The next encounter which our hero had with 
the enemy, was on June 14, 1645, at Naseby. 
He can now fight under no limitations. Prince 
Rupert is again to meet him. The king is 
present or near the battle ground. It was the 
last battle in the field for Charles, and his forces 
were " shivered to atoms." Two days before 
this conflict, Cromwell arrived from the Eastern 
Association and was received " amid shouts from 
the whole army." 

On the morning of the conflict he had the 



"94 WARRIOR. 

ordering of the horse. When the battle began 
Prince Rupert " charged up hill and carried all 
before him," and then galloped off to plunder. 
Cromwell on the other wing, charged down hill 
carrying all before him, and "did not gallop off 
the field to plunder." The prince returns from 
his plundering episode to find the king's infantry 
a ruin, and after a useless effort his cavalry are 
broken and flee. They left behind them the 
king's carriage with the famous cabinet contain- 
ing letters which have made some noise in the 
world. Of this Naseby battle Cromwell wrote 
to the Parliament, " This is no other but the 
hand of God, and to him alone belongs the 
glory, wherein none are to share with him." 

No hope now remained for the royalist army, 
though a few places were still held for the king. 
Before the end of 1645, there were taken Bristol, 
Winchester, Basing House and Denington Castle. 
The first civil war was ended. 

We shall preserve the continuity of Cromwell's 
military history, passing for the present most of 
the events of three years, comprised in the inter- 
val between the defeat of Charles I. and the 
attempt of Charles IT. to restore royality. This 
attempt was made in 1648. Both Wales and 
Scotland in the summer of that year made prep- 



WARRIOR. 95 

arations for another war. The king Is still living, 
and negotiations with him are still going on, 
though three years have passed since his last 
battle. On the announcement of the movement 
in Wales, Cromwell takes his army there and 
spends a little more than two months, quells the 
disturbance, so far as he can within that limited 
time, and in July starts toward Scotland to 
undertake a far more difficult enterprise than the 
reduction of Wales. 

The Scots had voted an army of forty thousand 
men for the overthrow of Parliament, and this 
force, or half of it, is ready to invade England. 
Prince Charles, with such prospects of aid in 
sight, takes passage with a fleet, anchors in Yar- 
mouth Harbor, and from thence issues orders 
for Loudon to join him, which orders Loudon 
disregards. He crossed the Channel in July. 

On the twentieth of the following month, 
Oliver, at his writing-table in Warrington, is 
giving the Parliament a long and minute account 
of Preston battle. A day of thanksgiving is ap- 
pointed for the victory, and the prince with his 
fleet can sail back to Holland. The prisoners 
and the slain after the battle of Preston outnum- 
bered the Parliament army. There were twenty- 
one thousand men on the royal side ; Cromwell 



96 WARRIOR. 

had about eight thousand six hundred men, but 
the Ironsides were among them. 

After the defeat of the Scotch royalists, Crom- 
well with his army moves on to Edinburgh, 
where he was well received by Argyle and the 
Scots party, which was not in sympathy with 
royalty. 

The time is now near when the king is to die ; 
but of this tragedy it is unnecessary at present 
to say anything, except that on the death of his 
father Prince Charles assumed the title of King. 

We must now follow Cromwell to Ireland and 
as briefly as possible dispose of the Irish war, 
keeping in mind that the vindication of our hero, 
and not history, is the chief object of the present 
book. At the time of the arrival of the English 
army at Dublin, the Duke of Ormond had united 
the various Irish parties and they had invited 
Prince Charles to come to their island and be 
crowned ; while at the same time Scotland, on 
certain conditions, is ready to receive the prince 
as its king. Charles, then, has the opportunity, 
such as it is, to choose between these two offers ; 
and whichever offer is accepted, the purpose is to 
place the prince, if possible, on the English 
throne. Here, then, are two games to be played 
for the crown ; the first in Ireland, the second in 



WARRIOR. 97 

Scotland. Both were played, and in both the 
prince was the loser. 

It was in August, 1649, that the English fleet 
entered Dublin Harbor; and before September 
was gone the Irish game was nearly decided — cer- 
tainly all hope for Charles from that island was 
extinguished before the Parliament army left it. 

Oar present interest relates exclusively to 
Cromwell and his cause in Ireland. Banishment 
of war prisoners was a custom for which Parlia- 
ment was responsible, and it is unfair that the 
name of one commander should be branded with 
infamy for a practice that was a common one in 
his age, and which continued into the eighteenth 
century. As to the storming of towns, the ac- 
counts do not agree. Some loyalists acquit him 
of guilt ; others have stained his name by charg- 
ing him with needless cruelties. 

Cromwell himself claims that he did no wrong: 
or injustice to any inhabitant of the island. 
He claims this in his " Declaration to the Irish 
Bishops." He claims it too in a letter which he 
sent to the " Commander in Rosse," on the seven- 
teenth of October, 1649. The letter may be 
read in " Cromwelliana." He wrote, " Since my 
coming into Ireland, I have this witness for 
myself, that I have endeavored to avoid effusion 



- 



YYAKKIOK. 



of blood, having boon before no place to which 
rms have nor boon sent as might have 
tied ro the good and preservation of those to 
whom they were offered." That Cromwell be- 
ad not only that he was doing what was right, 
that God ssed him in his work, there can 
be no doubt. Ills private letters, written in Ire- 
land, prove this. 

n\ o quote from one letter : "Only this let me 
say. which is the best intelligence to friends who 
are truly Christian : the Lord is pleased still to 
vouchsafe ns his presence, and to prosper his 
own work in our hands : which to ns is more 
eminent because, truly, we are a company of 
poor weak worthless creatures. Truly our work 
is neither from our own brains, nor from our 
courage and strength ; but we follow the Lord. 
who goeth before, and gather what he scattereth, 
that so all may appear to be from him." An- 
other thing i- worth recording. If Cromwell had 
possessed that unscrupulous, unprincipled am- 
bition, which nearly all royalist writers have 
ibuted to him. ho would not have gone to Ire- 
land, ho would have remained in London i 
watched there the course of events. There was 
nothing for him to gain in tho Irish- campaign : 
there was only duty to be done. 



WABBIO 99 

When the work in Ireland was BO far accom- 
plished that it could be left with safety, Crom- 
well sailed for England, where he arrived in 
. 1650. 

Prince Charles's prospects from the Irish 
are- now gone, but hope rises for him in Scotland. 
He reached Edinburgh about the time of Oliv* 

arrival in London. lie was made king of the 
id was also proclaimed king ( -id. 

This was mainly the work of the Presbyterian 
Calvinistic party. The terms of this kingship 
were: subscriptions to the rigid doctrines of 
the '• Covenant." acknowledgment of his fatl. 
tyranny, and acknowledgment of his mother's 
idolatry. The men of Mar-ton Moor, who had 
fought for the Parliament in that battle, now 
stand pledged to Charles as their king, and are 
willing to fight to plaee this useless scion of 
Scotch royalty on the English throne. It is evi- 
dent that Oliver has more war work before him. 

The young prince did not at all like the terms 
which were offered him ; but he could not evade 
them. He is said to have recoiled at the thought 
of confessing his mother an idolatress : but yet, 
that being one of the conditions insisted on by 
the pious party, he signed the compact. 

And now we see an army of praying men, 



100 WARRIOR. 

controlled largely by ministers of the gospel, 
and mingled with them a few men not so used 
to prayers as oaths ; and over this army float 
the banners of the Stuarts. It is to meet at 
Dunbar another army of praying men — the 
Ironsides. Now, if ever, with such a gathering 
of Calvinists, Presbyterians, Independents, and 
royalist churchmen, is the time for that bright 
star of courtesy, with which poetry decks war ; 
and after the battle that star did shine a little, 
but not before. 

Lord Fairfax, who has been for some years 
the nominal commander of the English forces, 
though urged by the Council of State and by 
Cromwell to lead the army against the Scots, 
declines to do so, influenced, it is said, by 
his wife. And now Cromwell becomes, for the 
first time, " Commander-in-Chief." His title is 
changed, but nothing more. He has long been 
the supreme man in England. 

It was on the twenty-sixth of June, 1650, that 
our hero was made the chief commander of the 
army. Three days later he was on his way to 
the North. In August his tents are pitched 
within sight of Edinburgh. For the intricate 
movements about that city, the letters which were 
exchanged between the belligerents, the difficult 



WARRIOR. 101 

position into which the Parliament army was 
forced, we have not space in this work. The 
reader must go to Carlyle if he would have light 
on these matters ; and to Carlyle he must go, as 
intimated before, if he wishes to read the account 
of the Dunbar battle, the most graphic piece of 
war history, perhaps, to be found in the English 
language. 

By the second of September, failing to bring 
the commander, David Lesley, to an engage- 
ment, and needing supplies, Oliver's army has 
been forced to take a position at Dunbar, fifteen 
miles from Edinburgh, and a mile or two from 
the sea. The army is inclosed there between 
the heaths and mountains. Some ships are at 
anchor in the bay, but they can be of no present 
service. Cromwell's men are dying fast from dis- 
ease. In these desperate circumstances, like the 
true, unselfish man that he was, on the second of 
September he writes to the governor of New- 
castle these noble words : " Whatever becomes 
of us, it will be well for you to get what forces 
you can together, and the South to help you 
what it can." Whatever becomes of us, let the 
war go on. 

David Lesley follows Cromwell to Dunbar, 
and on the evening before the battle his soldiers, 



102 WARRIOR. 

descending from a hill, were placed in a position 
which gave Oliver hope. Lesley thinks that 
Oliver is lost. Oliver, seeing the disposition 
which Lesley is making of his troops, believes that 
he is not lost. The Scotch commander, who on 
the morning of the third expected that Cromwell 
and his army would be extinguished, in the after- 
noon of that day was back in Edinburgh, with 
leisure for reflection. His force had been about 
twenty thousand men ; Oliver's about half that 
number. 

Cromwell's letter to the Parliament, dated the 
fourth, reports two hundred colors taken, all the 
artillery, fifteen thousand arms, near ten thousand 
prisoners, and about three thousand slain. He 
writes, " I do not believe we have lost twenty 
men ; " and at the time of writing he had not 
heard of one commissioned officer lost. He fur- 
ther writes, " Since we came in Scotland, it 
hath been our desire and longing to have avoided 
blood in this business." No doubt of that, but 
Charles Stuart must be kept out of England, if 
it does cost some Calvinistic and Presbyterian 
blood to do it. It was, also, on the fourth, the 
day after the battle, that he wrote a touching 
letter (quoted elsewhere) to his wife, telling her 
that she was " dearer to him than any creature." 



WARRIOR. 103 

Soon after the battle of Dunbar, Cromwell 
fixes his quarters at Edinburgh. Charles is at 
Sterling, where it is impossible to reach him. 
The army which had been destroyed at Dunbar 
was made up of men whose death the king is 
said not to have regretted, because they were 
Presbyterians ; they fought for him, many of 
them had died for him, but they were Calvin- 
ists, who had forced him to listen to theological 
discussion, and at last to accept their covenant, 
which he hated. From Lesley's army those 
who, naturally, most sympathized with the king 
were, so far as possible, excluded ; but among 
the parties in Scotland was one which had no 
affiliation whatever with the Presbyterians, and 
from that party Charles succeeded in creating 
another army. 

This new army Cromwell had no opportunity 
to meet. It was impossible for him to ascend 
the hill on which the Castle of Sterling stands. 
The winter and the spring, therefore, passed 
away without any general battle. When sum- 
mer came the kin? had his choice of retreating? 
to the North with this new army, where it would 
be next to impossible for the Parliament army to 
encounter him, or to venture into England. 
Cromwell placed his army, either from necessity 



104 WARRIOR. 

or by design, in such a position that the way to 
England was open. Charles chose that way, 
expecting, doubtless, that his force would be 
increased as he advanced southward, and that 
he would be able not only to secure a defensive 
position, but also to destroy the army of the 
Parliament. Except on such a supposition, 
his course must be regarded as a wild and des- 
perate one. The people of England did not, 
however, flock to his standard. One or two 
attempts were made to aid him, but they failed. 

In his march of three hundred miles through 
the heart of England less than two thousand men 
joined him. 

It has often been said that the Puritans were 
a minority of the people ; if so, the royalists 
showed lack of spirit in refusing to come to the 
succor of the king. Instead of being able, by 
increasing his numbers, to make a stand and 
fight a battle, Charles was forced to march 
southward to Worcester. Cromwell followed 
him at a distance ; and as he advanced recruits 
came in from all quarters, so that he had, on 
reaching Worcester, thirty thousand men, an 
army superior in number to any which he had 
before commanded ; and which, it has been re- 
ported, could be increased, if necessary, to over 



WARRIOR. 105 

one hundred thousand men. The indications are 
that the cause of the Parliament was more popu- 
lar, even outside the eastern counties, than that 
of the king. 

The result of the battle of Worcester mio-ht 
easily have been foreseen. The position held by 
the royal army was, indeed, very strong, and it 
required more strategic work to overthrow it than 
Cromwell had yet undertaken ; but it was inevi- 
table, situated as Charles was, that he should be 
beaten. It was but a question of time. One 
rather wonders, when the defeat of the king 
might be made absolutely certain by the vast 
army which surrounded the little city, that Crom- 
well, as old writers tell us, " did exceedingly haz- 
zard himself riding up and down in the midst of 
the fire.'' His reputation for courage was estab- 
lished, and yet he puts himself where a bullet 
might make an end of those dark, ambitious 
schemes, which royalists assure us were then, 
and even earlier, covered over and concealed by 
his hypocrisy. It was his purpose, in that Wor- 
cester battle, to do his duty regardless of personal 
consequences. He thought no more of future 
place and power than the meanest soldier who 
fought under him. He could, probably, have 
gone from that Worcester battle to a throne, but 



106 WARRIOR. 

his sole object in it was to keep Charles Stuart 
out of England. 

The battle was fought on the third of Septem- 
ber, 1651, one year from the day of Dunbar. 
The fighting on both sides was bravely done. 
Charles, says one report, watched the first part 
of the engagement from the top of the cathedral ; 
an. I then, at what he thought an opportune mo- 
ment, descended to join in it. But what could 
he do against Cromwell and the Ironsides? 
Nothing. His Sacred Majesty can only escape — 
flee to the oak-tree for a hiding place, and, finally, 
to the Continent ; but " fourteen thousand other 
men, sacred too, after a sort, though not Sacred 
Majesties, did not escape ; one could weep for 
such a death, for brave men, in such a cause." 
This was the last of Cromwell's battles ; he is 
soon to begin another kind of warfare. 

If in this country, as in France, it were the 
custom to recognize, by public monuments, heroes 
who in their day were misrepresented or neg- 
lected, Oliver Cromwell, long since, would have 
stood on many of our public squares to represent 
a warrior who fought only for duty, and to secure 
for Englishmen, and for the colonists of New 
England, the blessings of civil and religious 
liberty. 



CHAPTER VI. 

PARLIAMENT AND KINGSHIP. 

Oliver was a member of the Parliament of 
1G28. He was now twenty-nine years old, 
and represented Huntingdon, his native place. 
This was the third Parliament of Charles I., and 
the first in which Oliver sat. It met in March, 
and continued its sessions, with one interruption, 
for a year. 

England was now awake to the enormities of 
the Government, and so fully awake that the 
Speaker of the House, who was ordered by the 
king not to put to vote a question involving the 
people's liberties, was held by force in his chair 
until the vote could be taken. The vote was 
passed by acclamation, the king's usher standing 
meanwhile outside the door of the House. The 
men responsible for this proceeding paid the 
107 



108 PARLIAMENT AND KINGSHIP. 

penalty of it by imprisonment ; it would hardly 
be unjust to say that one of them, Sir John Eliot, 
for his share in it, was murdered in the Tower 
by Charles I. 

Oliver, a young farmer fresh from the country, 
looked, we may suppose, with some surprise on 
this scene. It was something new in English 
history. In the time of Henry VIII., or in 
Elizabeth's time it would not have been possible 
for subjects, in that way, to insult anointed maj- 
esty. But it was done in Charles's Parliament, 
and done, so far as we know, without help from 
Oliver. The scene was a part of his education. 
He saw the king, not at bay, but near it, " strug- 
gling much to be composed, but yet writhing with 
royal rage." 

Just before the session closed, and near the end 
of its year, the member for Huntingdon rose to 
his feet and said that his old schoolmaster, Dr. 
Beard, had told him that Dr. Alabaster "had 
preached flat popery at Saint Paul's Cross." 
It certainly was not much of a speech which the 
new member made ; and it may as well be re- 
marked here, as elsewhere, that Oliver, unlike 
most men who have ability, was not fond of mak- 
ing speeches. Later on, after the wars, he was 
able to make very long speeches, but he never 



PARLIAMENT AND KINGSHIP. 109 

liked the business, and he always spoke extem- 
poraneously ; further, he never took the least 
pains to have what writers took down corrected 
and preserved. A great man more oblivious to 
literary reputation has never lived ; yet he was 
a strong writer. Some of his war letters, which 
he felt it his duty to write to the Parliament, are 
very ably written. 

The episode of Denzil Holies, John Selden, 
Sir John Eliot and others, made an end of the 
famous Parliament of 1628, which sat till March, 
1629, and then Oliver went back to his farming. 
About eleven years later, the king having ruled 
alone, or with Wentworth's and Laud's assistance, 
in the interval, Oliver is sent by the town of 
Cambridge to the Parliament of April 13, 1640. 
That Parliament continued for only three weeks. 
His Majesty has on his hands what has been 
called the " Bishop's War," a war to force sur- 
plices and other ecclesiastical appendages on the 
Scots. Failing to get money from the Parlia- 
ment for this purpose, His Majesty dismissed the 
members and decided to raise the needed funds 
by " forced loans, or how he could." The Scots, 
under these circumstances, conclude not to wait 
for the king's army to enter Scotland, but to 
enter England with their army. 



110 PARLIAMENT AND KINGSHIP. 

The two armies meet near Newcastle ; the 
English army, seemingly not so much interested 
in the Episcopal mission as the king, shows but 
little inclination to fight, does a little fighting 
and marches southward to York. The Scots 
then take possession of the north of England 
and hold it for about a year. The Puritans 
looked on them as their saviors. Ballad singers 
in the streets of London sang their praises. The 
king and Laud lament to find the Scots so indif- 
ferent to religion. 

Again a Parliament is summoned ; the most 
famous, the most infamous, of all the Parliaments 
in the records of English history. It met on the 
third of November, 1640. To this Long Parlia- 
ment Oliver is sent to represent again the town 
of Cambridge ; and he continues a member of it 
while serving in the army, and up to the hour 
when he dissolved it, twelve years later, on the 
morning of April 20, 1653. 

For more than twelve years, doing good work 
and bad work, and toward the end only bad work, 
it sat until compelled to sit no longer. But the 
good which it accomplished far exceeded the evil ; 
to it and to what grew out of it, England is in- 
debted, in our day, to the gracious speeches 
which are made by the Queen to her Parliaments. 



PARLIAMENT AND KINGSHIP. Ill 

Prerogative unlimited was doomed after 1640, as 
Charles and his brother James learned to their 
disappointment and humiliation. 

In the Parliament of 1640, or rather in the 
early years of it, Cromwell was a silent member ; 
but he was on many committees, and on one com- 
mittee to which it is necessary to refer. He was 
on the committee appointed to look into the cases 
of the victims of tryanny. 

The most delicate and unpleasant part of the 
present writer's task is that which compels him 
to refer to his hero's opposition to the Episcopal 
Church. Archbishop Laud was in the Tower. 
He Avas impeached by the Commons soon after 
the meeting of the Parliament. It does not ap- 
pear that Cromwell took any part in the discus- 
sions which terminated so fatally for the head of 
the Church. He, certainly, was no more respon- 
sible for the needlessly cruel sentence than the 
members, a majority of the House, who voted for 
it ; but he was, to a great degree, responsible for 
the temporary suspension of the kind of Episcopacy 
which Laud and the Star Chamber had enforced. 
Lenient in after life, he was not inclined to be 
so in 1641. 

Perhaps the reader will find some excuse for 
him, if all the accessible facts are considered. 



112 PARLIAMENT AND KINGSHIP. 

Trained as he had been in childhood, baptized 
himself, and having his children baptized, at 
Episcopal fonts ; inclined, both from taste and 
from principle, to a simple form of worship ; 
irritated, it is probable, by changes and innova- 
tions in the parish of Huntingdon of which Laud 
was made archdeacon, while he [Oliver] was yet 
a boy ; inclined to freedom of conscience in 
matters of religion, it is hardly to be wondered 
at that he deviated from a right course touching: 
the Church, and especially after his investigations 
as a member of the Parliament committee had 
shown that Prynne and Dr. Bastwick and the 
Rev. Mr. Burton had had their ears cropped, 
and their cheeks stamped with hot irons, and 
had been put into pillories, in Old Palace Yard, 
in sight of all who chose to see them, because 
they did not like Laud's system or his surplices. 
"It is too hot to last," said the Rev. Mr. Bur- 
ton, as he was carried fainting to his house. 

In addition to these matters you must recall 
what we may designate as Oliver's general ecclesi- 
astical education ; remember that he had been 
taught in his earlier years to hate papacy, and in 
later years to consider prelacy but another name 
for papacy, which he might naturally do when 
the archbishop soon after consecration was offered 



PARLIAMENT AND KINGSHIP. 113 

a cardinal's hat by the Pope of Rome. It is true 
that Laud could not accept the offered cardinal- 
ship, but that he was a man to whom it could be 
offered was significant. 

And what, was Oliver's ecclesiastical education 
in his earlier life ? To answer this question 
some things referred to in another chapter, must 
be repeated. It is not improbable that those 
who had lived in Mary's time had told him of 
Latimer and Ridley and Cranmer burned in the 
streets of Oxford ; if not, he knew well enough 
the awful history of Mary's reign. It is quite 
possible that he had heard from eye-witnesses of 
the scene in the great square of Brussels, in 
1568, when Horn and Egmont, champions of the 
Protestants, in sight of Spanish soldiers had 
their heads struck off by order of Alva's bloody 
council ; if not, he had often read of the vast 
destruction of human lives in the Netherlands, 
which was going on a few years before he was 
born. 

The Armada, composed of one hundred and 
twenty-nine vessels, which, with Parma's Ant- 
werp fleet, it was hoped would land forty thou- 
sand men on the coasts of England only eleven 
years before his birth, had been sent by Philip 
of Spain to convert Episcopalians, then about 



114 PARLIAMENT AND KINGSHIP. 

half the population of the country, into Roman 
Catholics — to convert them, if possible, by the 
sledge-hammer and fire processes which Alva had 
found ineffective twenty years before ; which 
had proved a failure after a hundred thousand 
lives had been sacrificed, and an almost equal 
number driven to other lands. 

The Gunpowder Plot, for blowing up whoever 
might happen to be in the Parliament House on 
the opening day — king, lords, churchmen and 
Puritans — was discovered on the eve of its execu- 
tion, in November, 1605. Oliver, then six years 
old, would keep that story, often told at his 
father's fireside, in memory, and it would be sure 
to leave its mark on his character. Then came 
the cruel death of Henry, by Jesuits in Paris, 
and the commencement of the Protestant and 
Catholic thirty years' war. 

In forming an opinion of Cromwell, so far as 
regards prelacy that came near to papacy, all 
these things should be remembered ; and it should 
also be remembered that toleration was a blessing 
yet to be discovered in the middle of the seven- 
teenth century. Cromwell, in 1641, was not 
tolerant. No king in Europe at that time was 
tolerant. When Protector he was probably the 
most tolerant ruler in the world. He did not 



PARLIAMENT AND KINGSHIP. 115 

then interfere with Episcopalians or with Ana- 
baptists so long as they kept to their legitimate 
work, and made no attempt to overthrow the 
Government. It was not the Church, but the 
minister who connected himself with politics and 
with the schemes of Charles, that he opposed. 

Thurloe, in his " State Papers," has a letter to the 
States General, written by Beverning soon after 
the Protectorate began, in which it is stated that 
the Lord Protector " doth take a great deal of 
pains, and hath already spent much time about 
the affairs of the Church of England, to bring 
the same, by some toleration . . . into a 
peaceable condition to the content of all differ- 
ing parties, and that the business is so far ad- 
vanced that a meeting is, upon certain conditions 
agreed on, not under the name of a synod, but 
of a loving and Christian-like reception, where 
every one may propound for a mutual toleration. 
It is also firmly agreed on, that, to that end, the 
Bishops and Anabaptists shall be admitted into 
it, as well as the Independents and Presbyterians ; 
but with this proviso, that they shall not dispute 
one another's principia but labor to agree in 
union." 

The only important object had in view in the 
preparation of this book, was the vindication of 



116 PARLIAMENT AND KINGSHIP. 

Cromwell ; to show that he was a true man all 
through his life, honest in all his private and 
public acts. The stains which the writer wished 
to obliterate, or at least in part to remove, were 
connected with his opposition to the Church and 
his part in the king's death. The reader must 
judge whether or not he is vindicated touching 
the Church ; he must certainly see that the provo- 
cation to put the Church out of the control of 
the Star Chamber Court was great enough to en- 
list the service of a pious and honorable man, 
and must also see that it was inevitable that 
Cromwell, with his education, should believe 
that a religious organization could be established 
better than that which the king and his bishops 
had controlled. Surely it is not difficult to attri- 
bute to him honest intentions, however much one 
may criticise his policy. 

Three years passed between the time of 
Charles's defeat and his death, years of infinite 
confusion. The king flew from Oxford to the 
Scots. . The Scots offer to fight for him if he 
will accept their covenant and sanction the Pres- 
byterian worship. English Presbyterians will 
also join the Scots. The king refuses the offer. 
He hopes to get the Independents, of whom 
Cromwell was the chief, and the Presbyterians 



PARLIAMENT AND KINGSHIP. 117 

to fighting among themselves ; hopes to extir- 
pate in this way the two great parties. Charles 
is still revered by all parties, and all would be 
glad to see him on the throne again. Oliver, as 
will soon appear, was most desirous to have him 
restored. Of the fate which awaited him no one 
thought or dreamed. 

The Scots, a rather singular sort of people in 
those days, and much divided, failing to get the 
king to accept their form of religion, held Charles 
and finally virtually sold him to the Parliament, 
for four hundred thousand pounds. Charles goes 
back to England a prisoner, under escort of par- 
liamentary commissioners. After a time the In- 
dependent party, which was in the main the army 
party, stole the king away from the Parliament 
or Presbyterian party, and the excuse for this 
act was, that the Presbyterians were likely to 
restore him without just and needed limitations. 

These things were going on in the year 1646. 
In December of that year, Londoners sent up a 
petition to the Parliament asking that His Majesty 
may again be king. In the following February, 
Sir Thomas Fairfax, who was still the nominal 
commander-in-chief of the army, went northward 
to meet Charles, kissed his hand and then con- 
ducted him to Holmby. The limits of our book 



118 PARLIAMENT AND KINGSHIP. 

confine us to the minimum of history ; only space 
is taken to give so much as will serve to make 
clear Oliver's position. He is rather an obscure 
figure during a greater part of the three years 
from 1646 to 1649. " The quarrel between city 
and army, . . . the split of Parliament into 
two clearly hostile parties of Presbyterian and 
Independents, the deadly wrestle of these two 
parties, with victory to the latter, all this trans- 
acts itself . . . without autografic note, or 
indisputable authentic utterances of Oliver's, to 
elucidate it for us." For a long time, so far as 
we can see, he simply watches from his place in 
the army, or in the Parliament, the course of 
events. 

On June 2, 1647, Cornet Joyce, with five 
hundred troopers, appears at Holmby house " to 
the horror and despair of the Parliament Com- 
missioners in attendance there, but clearly to the 
satisfaction of His Majesty ; " and with Cornet 
Joyce His Majesty rides off to Hinchinbrook, 
where Colonel Montague, now its owner, receives 
him. It was that same house in which, forty-four 
years before, Sir Oliver Cromwell had enter- 
tained King James, and where little Oliver, Sir 
Oliver's godchild, and little Charles, now the dis- 
crowned king, had probably played together. 



PARLIAMENT AND KINGSHIP. 119 

Col. Whalley, who in after years was a pro- 
tected regicide here in New England, was sent 
by Gen. Fairfax with a strong force to release 
the king and take him back to Holinby. Charles 
refuses the proffered aid; prefers to be a prisoner 
under the army rather than under the Parliament. 
Pie is taken to Hampton Court and there, though 
under surveillance, he is treated with respect, and 
with him negotiations are carried on with a view 
to his restoration. 

Cromwell, month after month, visits him, estab- 
lishes seemingly agreeable relations with him, and 
does what he can to persuade the king, whom he 
discovers to be an able man, to accept a modified 
Government. It soon, however, becomes appar- 
ent that it was not the purpose of Charles to be 
placed on the throne by Cromwell and the army. 
He has other plans concealed, he hopes, under his 
chicanery. While Oliver is visiting him, with 
danger to himself, for a part of the army begins 
to suspect their great leader of treachery, the 
king is playing a separate game of his own ; a 
game which, if successful, would be fatal to the 
Puritans, and almost certain death to Oliver. 

In November, 1G47, he manages to escape 
from Hampton Court and get to the Isle of 
Wight ; but there, where he hoped to be received 



120 PARLIAMENT AND KINGSHIP. 

by the governor as a guest and to be protected, 

he finds himself again a prisoner. 

When at Hampton Court " a plan of political 
reform," says Green in his •• History of the English 
People." was presented to the king. •• Belief and 
worship were to be free to all." '-Acts enforc- 
ing the use of the Prayer Book, or attendance 
at church, or the enforcement of the covenant 
were to lie repealed. Even Catholics were to be 
freed from the bondage of compulsory worship." 
4 - Cromwell . . . clung to the hope of ac- 
commodation with a passionate tenacity. His 
mind, conservative by tradition, and above all 
practical in temper, saw the political difficulties 
which would follow on the abolition of monarchy, 
and in spite of the king's evasions, he persisted 
in negotiating with him ; but Cromwell stood 
almost alone." 

It must be remembered that these efforts for 
the king's restoration were made after seven 
years of war : and certainly, if Green is correct 
in his statements, it would seem that the charges 
made so often against Cromwell, as ambitious for 
the throne, are wholly without foundation. Proofs 
that his ambition did not look in that direction, 
but only to a good government for England, will 
multiply as we go on. 



PARLIAMENT AND KINGSHIP. 121 

Cromwell risking his life for the king, is a 
part of his history which royalist writers connect 
with duplicity. Hume, who can perhaps be be- 
lieved in such a matter, says that during the 
negotiations at Hampton Court Charles offered 
the garter — the garter to Oliver ; the old brand- 
ing-iron of St. Ives, with O. C. on it, at the 
moment of this offer, would have pleased Oliver 
better than all the garters which the kino- had 
at his disposal. Knightship, the future of his 
country being in the balance, was but a small 
thing to the man who, at a later time, could say 
that the crown was but " a feather in one's cap." 

England is now in danger. All that has been 
done by Cromwell and the Puritans may be lost. 
The men who went into the struggle in 1640 in 
good faith, with half the country to support them, 
are likely to find themselves condemned to die. 
Hamilton, and men not of the Presbyterian type, 
have now got control of the Scotch Parliament ; 
and an army, not of the praying kind like that 
of Dunbar, is threatened. Charles, at the Isle of 
Wight, to give further evidence of his perfidy, 
signs a treaty with the Scots for an invasion of 
the kingdom ; and a new war, as parties then 
stood, would leave but little hope. Wales, too, 
with its Presbyterian colonels, is declaring for 



122 PARLIAMENT AND KINGSHIP. 

royalism ; the country is in danger. What, then, 
shall Cromwell and his officers do under such 
circumstances ? Shall they die, or shall they kill 
the king? That is the one personal question for 
them to decide in the year 1648. They, natu- 
rally, prefer not to die ; prefer that the king 
should die. 

There were, of course, great interests pertain- 
ing to the nation to be considered ; but apart 
from all matters of national welfare, reducing 
the case to a personal one, it is difficult to 
see wherein the regicides are worthy of blame. 
Charles had played his desperate diplomatic game 
until the patience of Cromwell and his fellow 
Puritans was exhausted ; played it until there 
was a certainty either that the general of the 
army and other leaders in the war must lose all 
that they had fought for, and then give up their 
lives, or that the king must pay the penalty for 
his crimes. There was no other alternative in 
sight when the beginning of the year 1649 
approached. 

Long before the time of which we are writing, 
in the early part of 1648, there was held in 
Windsor Castle a prayer meeting such as never 
before and never since have those old walls echoed 
to. It was a prayer meeting of army officers. 



PARLIAMENT AND KINGSIIIP. 123 

It was continued into the third day. The 
" strongest heads and the strongest hearts " of 
England were in it. Strange as such a thing 
seems in this age, Lieut.-Gen. Cromwell was 
there, and did " press very earnestly," says 
one who was at the meeting, " on all there pres- 
ent, to a thorough consideration of our actions 
and of our ways, particularly, as private Chris- 
tians, to see if any iniquity could be found in 
them, and what it was, that, if possible, we might 
find it out," etc. At the close of the meeting: 
this decision was arrived at : " That it was our 
duty, if ever the Lord brought us back again in 
peace, to call Charles Stuart, that man of blood, 
to an account for the blood he had shed, and the 
mischief he had done to his utmost against the 
Lord's cause and people in these poor nations." 

The polity of the Puritans was, possibly, defect- 
ive. It might have been more judicious to re- 
tain the king a prisoner; but if ever capital 
punishment is just and right it was surely so 
in this case. The judges had to deal with a 
man who, after seventeen years of misrule, had 
committed a most brutal, savage- like act, by 
attacking the Parliament with hundreds of armed 
men at his back, and demanding the surrender of 
members to him, to be dealt with, doubtless, as 



124 PARLIAMENT AND KINGSHIP. 

Eliot had been dealt with ; who then, a few days 
after this atrocity, fled from the members of the 
Commons who had been sent to St. Stephen's to 
make laws for their country ; who then, for the 
sake of prerogative and that only, had kept up a 
seven years' war ; who, as ruler, was incapable of 
telling the truth, or of keeping a treaty, or of 
governing justly ; a man, in a word, who had put 
himself outside the pale of mercy. 

Cromwell, then, was a regicide. His name 
stands the third on the list of the fifty-nine signers 
of Charles's death warrant. Charles returns to 
Whitehall to die. Royalism all over Europe 
utters a shriek, " happily, at length, grown very 
faint in our day." The Puritans in England, 
and the Puritans in the colonies of New England, 
utter no shriek, but are, on the contrary, grateful 
to the daring men who have placed a king, whom 
they had known only as a despot, where he could 
no longer do them harm. Milton sang the j)raises 
of Cromwell, " the chief of men." 

Not long after the death of Charles, in May, 
1649, it was declared, after much debating in the 
Parliament, and consultations in committees, that 
England should be a Commonwealth. 

Four years and more are now to pass before 
Oliver is named Protector. During a part of 



PARLIAMENT AND KINGSHIP. 125 

this time he is occupied in carrying' on the war in 
Ireland, and the Scotch war which terminated at 
Worcester, in September, 1651. 

The interval between his last battle and the 
Protectorate included more than two years. At 
the beginning of this period it was impossible, 
after his victories in both the civil wars, also in 
the campaign in Ireland, and in the war with 
Scotland, that he should fail of recognition as the 
strongest, ablest man among Englishmen ; and, 
though he had been but little in the Parliament 
House, and had scarcely ever spoken there, it 
must also have been discovered that he had in 
him the elements of a statesman. 

His return to London was a triumph rarely 
accorded to a conqueror. He was met by a com- 
mittee of the Parliament at a distance from the 
city. \Vhitelocke, the eminent lawyer, was one 
of those who went out to meet him with congratu- 
lations. On entering the streets of London he 
is met by the Speaker of the House, by the Council 
of State, by sheriffs, mayors, and a vast multitude ; 
but he has the good sense to rightly estimate 
the worth of such a crowd, and is said to have re- 
marked that more people would come out to see 
him hung. He is silent, for the most part, about 
himself, while he praises the soldiers who have 



126 PARLIAMENT AND KINGSHIP. 

fought with him. One who looked on him in 
this scene, and who knew him well, is reported to 
have said, " This man will be king of England 
yet." The great conqueror is voted, for a home, 
Cardinal Woolsey's Hampton Court Palace, the 
residence of sovereigns from the time of Henry 
VIII. " This was the moment," says Fred- 
erick Harrison, " when a Bonaparte would have 
seized the vacant throne;" but "he betook him- 
self to work as a simple member of the Council." 

Ten years and more have now gone since as 
plain Mr. Cromwell he had offered to loan a 
part of his property for the service of the Com- 
monwealth, and to undertake the dangerous 
business of recruiting soldiers in the town of 
Cambridge ; and now, when his clear sight, his 
valor and his character have placed him at the 
head of the nation, and the Parliament had 
almost marked him for a supreme ruler, he goes 
to work as a common citizen, a committee mem- 
ber, hoping to aid in settling the Government ; 
an exceptional man presenting a noble example. 

It has not yet become popular to represent 
Cromwell on canvas, but the time will come 
when painters will abandon, for a while, the saints 
of mediaeval times, and hang not a few Crom- 
well historical pictures on the walls of English 



PABLIAMENT AND KINGSHIP. 127 

galleries. Tlie frail beauties of Charles's court, 
who now smile on admiring' crowds in Hampton 
Palace, will one clay divide with the Protector, 
the Protectress, with Elizabeth Claypole and 
Puritan chiefs, the attention of English and 
American sightseers anxious to study the history 
of the seventeenth century. 

Between the day of the Worcester battle and 
the breaking up of the Long Parliament, the 
records of Oliver's life are but few, and there 
are no letters of that time which throw new light 
on him ; but it is well known that he was then 
constantly laboring for the settlement of the 
Government. Mr. Harrison has clearly explained 
his position during this period, and the present 
writer here avails himself of some of the state- 
ments of this author, rather than attempt to put 
into his own language what has been so lucidly 
set forth. He says that Cromwell did not bring 
himself " conspicuously before the nation ; " that 
while " legally in control of the whole military 
forces " he " worked on at the administrative 
business," and " worked without display, accept- 
ing the shadowy authority of the remnant, or fag 
end, of the Long Parliament ; " that he was 
"zealous for social order," and "looked directly 
for the mending of practical wrongs ; " that the 



128 PARLIAMENT AND KIXGSIIIP. 

" twenty-three thousand unheard eases waiting in 
chancery was a perpetual grievance to him ; " 
that he " was constantly troubled about the 
abuses of the law ; " that he was a man to whom 
official tyranny never appealed in vain ; " '• that 
lie was bent on a settlement,*' and " showed such 
a willingness to come to terms with the defeated 
party, and such a real sympathy with their pro- 
tracted sufferings, that the sterner spirits at once 
aeeused him of gaining the good will of the 
royalists to serve his own designs ; " that he 
" saw plainly that the nation was not prepared 
for a definite republic, nor had he any preference 
for it ; " that he " saw that without some mo- 
narchical element . . . the English scheme 
of government and law could scarcely be got 
into work again ; " that " a person as ruler was 
essential ; " that he " inclined toward a personal 
head of the State, though he shrunk from the 
name of king; " that soon after his return from 
Worcester " the question of a new Parliament 
was raised ... at his desire ; " that he 
" felt himself to be the guardian of the interests 
of all, even of those whom he had defeated ; " 
that he was " addressed by petitions for the re- 
dress of grievances in the matter of law, of 
imprisonment, of exactions, of tithes, as to one 



PARLIAMENT AND KINGSHIP. 129 

. . . into whose hands the sword was put ; " 
that he came into the position of general moder- 
ator ; " that, while some statesmen inclined to a 
restoration of one of the Stuart princes," he 
" objected to any recall of the princes ; " and 
that he "desired a settlement, with himself in- 
vested with some monarchical power, though as 
to name or prerogative of king he felt, and con- 
tinued to feel, the deepest hesitation and doubt." 
It will be noticed that allusion is made to a 
proposition for calling in one of the Stuart 
princes, and that Cromwell objected to the pro- 
posal, as he naturally would do after ten years 
of effort to keep that family from the throne. 
It has often struck the writer as a strange thins: 
that Bulstrode Whitelocke, at the conference of 
grandees at Speaker Lenthall's house, after the 
defeat at Worcester, should have said, "There 
may be a day given for the king's eldest son, or 
for the Duke of York to come in to the Parlia- 
ment ; " and not strange, if this was really said, 
that Oliver should have replied, "That will be a 
business of more than ordinary difficulty ; " a 
mild reply to an offensive remark. But did 
\Ybitelocke, at that famous conference, say what 
he reports himself to have said ? AVe doubt it. 
The account of the conference did not see the 



130 PARLIAMENT AND KINGSHIP. 

light until after the restoration. It may have 
been changed years after Cromwell was dead. 
Whitelocke himself wrote it. The learned law- 
yer, solid though he be, has in him " a kind of 
dramaturgic turn," a " poetic f riskiness " which 
" detracts from one's confidence " in his entire 
accuracy in this record. 

The Parliament, in the more than twelve years 
of its session, has been greatly reduced in the 
number of its members. On its fatal day, ac- 
cording to the highest estimates, less than one 
hundred were present at the meeting ; according 
to some estimates, less than sixty. But great or 
small, with many members or with few, it has 
determined, without any legal or moral right, to 
perpetuate itself. Cromwell and others tried, in 
every possible peaceful way, to induce the Parlia- 
ment not to perpetuate itself, but to dissolve 
itself, and give the country the opportunity for 
a new election. 

It must be remembered, in this connection, that 
Oliver was the soul of the Commonwealth. It 
was not in St. Stephen's Hall, where the debates 
were going on year after year, that the founda- 
tions of the Commonwealth were supported, but 
at Naseby, at Dunbar and at Worcester. 

There were great statesmen in the Parliament, 




OLIVER CROMWELL. 
i From Philip L. Rale's copy of Robert Walker' 8 portrait.) 



PARLIAMENT AND KINGSHIP. 131 

but these statesmen, without Oliver, would have 
been powerless to maintain the Government. In 

the field, in battling against Charles L, against 
Charles II., against the Irish, against the Scots, 
the commander of the Ironsides had done the 
work which was essential to the very existence of 
the Republic. 

With a mental and moral consistency rarely, 
if ever, surpassed ; with a decision that never for 
a moment failed him, and a vigor that was in- 
flexible ; with personal bravery equal to that of 
Caesar, and devotion to his work like Hannibal's ; 
with honesty, piety and prayer to God to bless 
his labors, this man, in sickness, trials, dangers, 
with humility and self-depreciation, ascribing all 
his successes to Providence, from the time when 
he took command of the army to the time when 
he entered St. Stephen's to tell the members to 
be gone, was, it is not too much to say, the only 
support of the Government that could be trusted 
with safety. If a figure that has truth in it may 
be used, he was both the corner-stone and the 
key-stone of the political structure which had 
been erected in place of a monarchy over the 
English people. Shall that structure go to 
pieces, allowing Charles on the ruins of it to build 
up his kingdom ? This was the question^ pre- 



132 PARLIAMENT AND KINGSHIP. 

sented to Cromwell on the morning of April 20, 
1G53. To prevent, if possible, this catastrophe, 
lie decides to break up the " Rump " of the Par- 
liament, and send the members to their homes. 

It is best to fortify the position here taken, 
which, it is needless to say, is not new or original, 
by a quotation which the writer was surprised to 
find in the eighth edition of the Encyclopaedia 
Britannica. " The Parliament, that great as- 
sembly that had molded the Commonwealth, had 
now, at the end of twelve years, exhausted its 
vitality, and dwindled into a mere mockery of 
representative government. It had become, in 
fact, an oligarchy which had absorbed to itself, 
not merely the whole administration of public 
affairs, but the control of many private interests." 
It was their " only serious occupation to main- 
tain themselves in power and defend themselves 
against their enemies." 

It was a daring act to dissolve even such a 
Parliament, and especially so in view of the after 
responsibility, which must, by necessity, fall on 
Cromwell. Whether or not he had taken a 
measure of the consequences of the dissolution, 
or had come to any decision as to what could be 
the probable result to himself personally, we 
have no means of knowing. We only know that 



PARLIAMENT AND KINGSHIP. 133 

duty compelled him to the act of dissolving the 
Parliament. On the night before the exploit 
many leading members and many officers of the 
army were at Oliver's house, and when the meet- 
ing broke up it was with the understanding tiiat 
the shameless proposition that the members of 
the existing Government " were to be de jure 
members of the new, and to constitute a com- 
mittee for deciding on the admission of their 
successors," should at least lie over, and that 
another meeting should be held the next morning. 
The next morning Oliver, in his reception-room, 
was waiting with a few members for others to 
come, when a message reached him that the 
Parliament was hurrying to a vote on the ob- 
noxious bill. What a supreme moment for the 
St. Ives farmer! The destiny of England is to 
be decided. The situation was not unlike that 
in which Julius Caesar was placed before he ad- 
vanced from Ravenna on Rome. Cromwell, like 
the Roman, did not hesitate. He starts off for 
St. Stephen's Hall in his plain clothes, calling, as 
he goes, on a company of his regiment to attend 
him, and to wait outside the House. He goes to 
his seat, listens for a while to the debate, and 
when the bill is about to be voted on he rises, as 
though intending simply to present his views on 



134 PARLIAMENT AND KINGSHIP. 

it. It is soon discovered that lie does not confine 
himself to the question. He wanders from it. 
He commends the House for some things it has 
done ; he censures it for its faults ; and at last 
says, "It is not fit that you sit here any longer." 
He calls for twenty or thirty musketeers, and the 
work is done. The scene in its details we have 
not space to describe. It is enough to say that 
Oliver has now taken the sole responsibility of 
destroying what remained of the legislature of 
his country. He has broken up the most famous 
Parliament that ever sat in England. His com- 
ment on this act is almost as remarkable as the 
act itself. " We did not hear a dog bark at 
their going," meaning that England quietly ac- 
cepted what had been done. The judges of the 
courts, the generals of the army, the captains in 
the navy send in their adherence to Cromwell, 
and the Government goes on with a " Constable " 
at the head of it. 

On the day following this judicious violence, 
the news journal, "Mercurius Politicus," con- 
tained the following : " The Lord General de- 
livered yesterday in Parliament divers reasons 
wherefore a present period should be put to the 
sitting of this Parliament, and it was accordingly 
done, the speaker and the members all departing ; 



PARLIAMENT AND KINGSHIP. 135 

the grounds of which proceedings will, it is prob- 
able, shortly be made public/' Such was the 
brief, official notice given to England, by Oliver, 
of this world-important event. The brevity and 
simplicity of the message are significant. 

What next ? Chaos or a government ? The old 
Government is gone, it was not worth saving ; it 
would soon, probably, have brought a new war 
and ruin to the country, but, good or bad, it no 
longer exists. There is no supreme authority. 
Cromwell's voice has destroyed all constitu- 
tional authority, and the responsibility is now 
laid on him to reconstruct, with such help as he 
can get, a government for the country. To a 
truth-seeking impartial observer, his efforts for 
the next five years must indicate a man, not of 
such ambition as has been almost universally 
attributed to him, but with an ambition limited 
to the pure and noble desire to secure for the 
people a good and safe representative adminis- 
tration. Instead of execration, he calls for our 
admiration and our sympathy. 

Within a few weeks one hundred and forty 
Puritan notables, men of approved fidelity and 
honesty, are summoned to act as a Parliament 
in the existing emergency. This extraordinary 
assembly met on the fourth of July. " The old 



136 PARLIAMENT AND KINGSHIP. 

and vulgar charge against them," says the En- 
cyclopaedia Britannica, " as a herd of mean and 
contemptible fanatics, is of a piece with the 
general run of historic portraiture of Cromwell 
himself, and has been sufficiently answered even 
by writers who have little sympathy for him. 
They were, indeed, a body of most sincere and 
earnest men, only too eager and comprehensive in 
their efforts to accomplish a national reform ; but 
they attempted too much." Of the one hundred 
and forty all save two came on the summons, 
and Oliver makes a speech to them which Carlyle 
says is all glowing with the splendors of genuine 
veracity and heroic depths and manfulness, and 
which seems to express the image of the soul it 
came from. 

Oliver was now fifty-four years old. Time had 
begun to leave its marks on him. Labor, care, 
sorrow, have left their imprints on his brow. 
Ambitious, then, of power and preferment ? Read 
the speech and you will dismiss that thought ; 
read it again and carefully, and Oliver will come 
before you a pitiable man, discharging a duty for 
the sake of England ; read it the third time, and 
your hatred will be turned to love. 

The " Little Parliament," so called, proved a 
failure. It sat for five months, attempted to 



PARLIAMENT AND KINGSHIP. 137 

abolish tithes, for one thing, and to have the 
Christian ministry otherwise supported ; at- 
tempted also to abolish the Court of Chancery, 
in which the twenty-three thousand suits were 
pending, and to contrive and establish a court in 
which contestants would not have to wait twenty 
to thirty years for a settlement of their cases. 
These legislators of the " Little Parliament " 
were too wise, too honest, too good, too advanced 
for the England of that asre. 

The Presbyterian clergy, snugly settled on 
tithes, and the lawyers of Temjde Bar, having an 
eye to the continuance of, at least, a part of the 
twenty-three thousand cases in Chancery, upset 
Oliver's first schemes for England's good. Do 
you mean, asked the clergy, to deprive us of our 
tithes ? Do you mean, asked the lawyers, to de- 
prive us of our " learned wigs," and our " lucra- 
tive long-windedness," with your search for " God's 
law," and " simple justice ? " 

Poor Oliver must try again. Public selfish 
clamor puts an end, for the time, to his proposed 
reforms, and his Parliament resigns its powers 
into his hands. He is in a dilemma. What his 
emotions and griefs were, the reader can imagine. 
What next ? Shall he become a usurper? That 
seems to be the best possible thing. Usurper, 



138 PARLIAMENT AXD KINGSHIP. 

until he can secure a settlement. He calls a 
council of officers and other persons of interest in 
the nation, and it is decided that he is to be 
known as the Lord Protector of England, Ire- 
land and Scotland, and is to have a council to 
aid him in his work. Usurper then, in one 
sense, Oliver has now become, though he calls 
himself, not much elated, a w * Constable." Bent, 
as before and always to the very end of life, on 
securing a constitutional and stable government. 
and seeing anarch v. at this time, a danger, and 
the return of Charles Stuart a menace, he takes 
a position unknown to the law and to a well- 
ordered community. It was bravely and nobly 
done. " Perhaps," remarks Carlyle, " no more 
perilous place was ever deliberately accepted by a 
man. The post of honor? Xo : the post of terror, 
and of danger, and forlorn hope." 

From a time near the beginning of the Protec- 
torate to the end of it, plots were laid every year 
to take the life of Cromwell, and large rewards, 
with honors, were offered to those who should 
succeed in the business ; but of those efforts and 
their failure we shall here say nothing. 

A Protectorate Parliament of four hundred 
members was called for September 3, 1654. At 
its opening the Protector announced that the end 



PARLIAMENT AND KINGSHIP. 139 

of the meeting was " healing and settling." " If 
this meeting/' he said, " prove not healing, what 
shall we do ? " Poor man. The speech was re- 
ceived with favor; but the " healing " was not 
secured. Among four hundred men there would 
necessarily be some not possessing wisdom, or 
even common sense, and these members soon be- 
gan foolishly to debate about the form of govern- 
ment, with its " single person." The Protector 
appears again and talks for an hour and a half, 
partly in defense of himself, and partly to let the 
members know that, called as they had been by 
himself to the Parliament, they had no right 
whatever to dispute his position or his authority. 
It was their business to legislate for the interests 
of the people, under the Government as it then 
stood. 

lie then tells them that he called not himself 
to the Protectorate, and affirms that some of the 
members know that fact. " Gentlemen that un- 
dertook to form the Government" called him to 
the guidance of it ; that he will not now " part 
with the duty, unless God and the people shall 
take it from him ; " that he hoped, in a private 
capacity, to reap the benefits " of our hard labors 
and hazzards ; " that he had begged long ago to 
be dismissed of his charge, begged it again and 



140 PARLIAMENT AND KINGSHIP. 

again (referring to a time antecedent to that of the 
Protectorate), and that that fact was also known 
to very many ; that the chief end of summoning 
that assembly, the Little Parliament, so far as it 
related to himself, was to lay down the power 
which was in his hands. 

" I say it to you again, in the presence of that 
God who hath blessed and been with me in all 
my adversities and successes, that was, as to my- 
self, my greatest end. . . . The authority 
I had in my hand, being so boundless as it was 
(for by act of Parliament I was General of all the 
forces of the three nations of England, Scotland 
and Ireland, in which unlimited condition I did 
not desire to live a day), we called that meeting 
for the ends before expressed." " Divers persons 
here do know whether I lie in that." 

He then tells them that the Protectorate did 
not put him into a higher capacity than before, 
but that it limited him ; bound him to do nothing 
without the consent of a council. He asks the 
members if they had not met under his writs, 
and tells them that persons " so chosen should 
not have the power to alter the Government, as 
now settled in one single person and a Parlia- 
ment." He tells them that a few days before 
they came thither the affairs of the nation were 



PARLIAMENT AND KINGSHIP. 141 

in peace and quiet ; that enemies abroad were 
hopeless and scattered ; but that the Parliament, 
since it met, had put everything into confusion, 
and was making the Government the scorn of the 
Dutch ambassadors who were then in London 
to negotiate their master's affairs. 

Becoming more earnest toward the end, he 
says that before he will throw away the Govern- 
ment he will be rolled into his grave and buried 
with infamy. Near the close of his speech he 
says, " I have caused a stop to be put to your 
entrance into the Parliament House ; I am sorry 
that there is cause for this, but there is cause." 

The Constable then tells the members that 
they will find in the lobby, without the Parlia- 
ment door, a thing for them to sign. The 
" thing " is a parchment, on which is engraved 
a promise to be true and faithful to the Lord 
Protector and the Commonwealth, and not to 
alter the Government as it is settled in a single 

o 

person and a Parliament. 

Before a month has passed three hundred of 
the four hundred members have put their names 
to the pledge. A rather singular sort of gover- 
nor you find this farmer of St, Ives to have been, 
but pure, true, honest. Even if one cannot love 
him, it is interesting to watch his movements ; to 



111! PARLIAMENT AND KINGSHIP. 

see him become the complete master of all the 
great statesmen of his day, the master oi Eng- 
land, and the most invincible of European rulers. 
lie tells Bradshaw and the rest of them, fanner- 
like, in the speech just quoted from, that he is 
'•almost tired talking to them so long," and he 
evidently is very sorry to stop the parliamentary 
harangues. While this is going on inside the 
Parliament, outside of it Oliver is projecting a 
movement which is to make the navy of England 
a permanent and notable power in the world. 
Vet not one of the four hundred Parliament 
men knew what he was doing outside the House, 
while he was scoring them inside, for their in- 
felicitous conduct ; not one of them know what 
the Meet which he was forming is to do, or where 
it is to go. Although tired of speaking, and 
annoyed because he has to speak, he is not 
too tired for action. In this third speech Oliver 
was not at his best, but it were better to lose a 
speech of Burke's or Webster's than to omit 
reading this talk of the St. Ives farmer to his 
first Protectorate Parliament. 

Large bodies of men. with varying interests, 
personal and local, as shown in the French Revo- 
lution and in the history of the United States, 
find it dillieult work to settle a government, and 



PARLIAMENT AND KINGSHIP. 143 

so it proved in England. After about five 
months Oliver discovers that the Parliament is 
likely to do nothing, or rather nothing but mis- 
chief. And then the " Constable " calls the 
members to the "Painted Chamber," and makes 
another long speech to them, which he cl< 
with these words : " I think it my duty to tell 
you that it is not for the profit of these nations, 
nor for common and public good, for you to con- 
tinue here any longer : and therefore I do de- 
clare unto you that I do dissolve this Parliament. " 
That the members listened in silence, is both 
a proof of his greatness and of the truth of what 
lie had said. lie told them that he had not in- 
terfered in any way with their proceedings ; that 
he had been caring for their quiet sitting, and 
that they had kept him u locked up " as to what 
they were transacting. u You might have pro- 
Led to make those good and wholesome laws 
which the people expected from you ; " hut instead 
of " peace and settlement," instead of " mercy 
and truth, . . . weeds and nettles, briars 
and thorns have thriven under your shadow. . . 
Dissettlement and division, discontent and dis- 
satisfaction . . . have been more multiplied 
within the five months of your sitting than in 
some years before." 



144 PARLIAMENT AND KINGSHIP. 

What a charge ! What a rebuke ! How 
sharp, yet how tender ! But for the restraints 
of his moral endowments, but for the pious 
element in him, this man Oliver might have in 
our day, in the annals of sarcasm, a place with 
Dean Swift and Junius. He was too good, how- 
ever, to be needlessly cutting, and so he let the 
members off rather kindly and mildly. It is to 
be regretted that our limited space forbids more 
of this speech to be given ; but enough has been 
quoted to indicate the sort of material Oliver was 
made of, and that he had good and sufficient 
reasons for sending the members to their homes. 

Carlyle says that this Parliament " considered 
that its one duty was to tie up the hands of the 
Protector well," and that Oliver " thought far 
otherwise." Another comment is, " Courage, 
my brave Oliver ! Thou hast but three years 
more of it, and then the coils and puddles of 
this earth are all behind thee ; and Carrion 
Heath, and Chancellor Hyde, and Charles Stuart, 
the Christian king, can work their will." 

On the seventeenth of September, 1G5G, an- 
other Parliament and the Protector met in the 
Painted Chamber. Oliver began his speech by 
saying that he had pity on himself when he 
thought of the duty before him ; but he turns his 



PARLIAMENT AND KINGSHIP. 145 

pity to the members when he considers how they 
will have to listen to him, in a close heated room. 
This was his fifth speech. It was extempora- 
neous like all his speeches. Oliver had, in 
earlier life, preached to his soldiers, and in that 
way we suppose he had acquired the art of talk- 
ing* in public, not, however, on politics. On this 
occasion he became very weary, and said to the 
members, " I know you are so, too." It was a 
great speech ; a remarkable one for a man to 
make who had been for twenty years a farmer, 
and for ten years a soldier; "rude, massive, 
genuine, not so fit for Drury Lane as for Val- 
halla and the Sanhedrim of the gods." 

AVe regret that in a work of this nature space 
forbids our quoting a line of it. In the lobby, 
as they were retiring, the members learned that 
they were to be winnowed ; that something less 
than a hundred of them were to be excluded. 
A protest is made, to which the Protector pays 
no attention. The imperial Constable has de- 
cided, and can waste no time on protests. 

It was at this time, or a little later, that thirty- 
eight wagon loads of Spanish silver passed 
through the streets of London to be coined at 
the Tower into English money ; an evidence that 
the Government is not limited to speech-making. 



146 PARLIAMENT AND KINGSHIP. 

That naval movement, which was so much a 
mystery to the members of the previous Parlia- 
ment, has begun to take effect. 

A large minority, at least, of the people of 
England have now discovered that, not only in 
war but in peace, Cromwell is the fittest man 
that they have to hold the supreme command. 
When he returned from Worcester, they recog- 
nized him as their greatest soldier ; they now 
see that he is also their greatest statesman ; the 
ablest man for governing that can be found ; not 
a Protector only, but a born ruler. The mem- 
bers of the new Parliament recognize his worth, 
and by a large majority they vote to offer him 
the kingship. A king he has been for three 
years, but now he is asked to accept the title. 

On the last day of March, in the year 1G57, 
Cromwell being then fifty-eight years old, the 
banqueting-room at Whitehall presented a spec- 
tacle which never before, and never since that 
day, has had a parallel. It may have been the 
custom in ancient times for men to raise upon 
their shields their strongest, ablest warrior and 
call him king ; but two centuries ago, kingship 
was supposed to be a divine gift, received through 
those in whose veins flowed royal and sacred 
blood. Not so thought the men of this second 



PARLI IMENT AND KINGSHIP. 147 

Protectorate Parliament. They saw in Cromwell 
a true king ; one needing no anointing ; a leader 
fit to lead, a ruler fit to rule, and now they come 
to Whitehall to offer the Protector the crown 
which William the Conqueror and Elizabeth had 
worn. The entire House came to present the 
" Petion " with the title King on it. 

As is his custom, Oliver replies that "the 
thing" will deserve the utmost deliberation and 
consideration. Three days later a Parliament 
committee waits upon him, and he then declines 
the title, saying, " that may be fit for you to offer, 
which may not be fit for me to undertake." A 
few days further on a larger committee, composed 
of ninety-nine members, waits upon him, and 
urges his acceptance. AVhitelocke and others ex- 
haust their legal learning, touching kingship, in 
the effort to convince him that it is his duty to 
take the name of king. 

There are seven speeches of Oliver's about this 
matter, and in not one of them can a line be 
found to indicate that he had the slightest 
ambition for a crown. One sees in them (or 
rather the writer sees in them) a man struggling 
to find the path before him ; groping his way on 
the side of a volcano, amid smoke and increasing 
darkness, hoping, yet almost against hope, to 



148 PARLIAMENT AND KINGSHIP. 

reach sun-lit valleys in safety ; a man, appealing 
to our hearts for sympathy, for affection, for 
pity. With the approval of all, and especially of 
the army, it is possible he would have acceded 
to the request ; that he desired the title, or put 
the least value upon it, there is no proof ; there 
is the opposite of proof. Constable is yet the 
better name for this immortal man. 

Let me quote a few of his words. " I am not 
able for such a trust and charge. . . . Out of 
necessity I undertook the business of Protector." 
He " has not desired the continuance cf his 
power or place, under one title or another. 
Truly, I have, as before God, often 
thought that I could not tell what my business 
was in the place I stood in, save comparing my- 
self to a good constable set to keep the peace 
of the parish. ... If the wisdom of the 
Parliament should have found a way to settle the 
interests of the nation upon the foundations of 
justice, truth and liberty, I would have lain at 
their feet that things might have run in such a 
current." 

Justice, truth, liberty ! When, in the Roman 
Forum, or in any modern hall of legislation, have 
patriots uttered a more comprehensive, or a nobler 
desire ? Finally he says, " I should not be an 



PARLIAMENT AND KINGSHIP. 149 

honest man if I did not tell you that I cannot un- 
dertake this Government with the title of king, 
and that is mine answer to this great and weighty 
business." 

While Oliver has the parchment offering king- 
ship in his hands, and is trying to tell the Parlia- 
ment in proper and grateful language that he 
declines the offer, Admiral Blake, under his 
orders, is sinking Spanish ships in the harbor of 
Santa Cruz, across the Atlantic, and an army is 
getting ready in England to join Turenne in the 
Low Countries to fight the Spaniards there. 
The Protector evidently has enough to do out- 
side of Whitehall and kingship, and he has also 
a most disagreeable obligation soon to discharge, 
touching this very Parliament which has offered 
him the crown. The discussion about that mat- 
ter being over, a new frame of Government includ- 
ing two Houses having been voted, Oliver having 
been formally installed as Protector, the prospect 
for harmony seemed bright, but it proved illusive. 
The first session of the Parliament closed harmoni- 
ously, and public affairs went on prosperously ; 
but all hope of a settlement vanished soon after 
the second session began. " Success on such a 
basis as the humors and parliamentary talking 
of four hundred men, is very uncertain." 



150 PARLIAMENT AND KINGSHIP. 

The first session decided to have another House, 
but did not decide what to call it. Oliver made 
up the " other House," with six peers, and such 
" men of eminence as the time had yielded." On 
the opening of the second session, his health not 
being* good, he spoke but little, and then called 
on Mr. Fennes to discover particularly what may 
be proper for the meeting. Mr. Fennes dis- 
covers, among other things, that cosmos is rising 
out of chaos in England ; but poor Oliver, a day 
or two later, sees more chaos than cosmos, and 
he deals with the chaos in his characteristic way. 
The Commons began their work in a dispute 
touching the name of the other House. Shall it 
be called a House of Lords ? Four hundred 
men in a crazy vessel floating on a dangerous 
shore, and some of them foolish enough, instead 
of helping to avert wreckage, to quarrel about the 
shape of their sails and the colors of their flags ! 
A few years later, standing at Charing Cross, 
under the gibbets, or passing through the water- 
gate to the dungeons of the Tower, they could 
repent their short-sightedness and their folly. 
Some of them had leisure to repent it in exile. 

Hearing of the proceedings in the Commons, 
Oliver instantly summoned both Houses to White- 
hall; the members must appear at three o'clock 



PARLIAMENT AND KINGSHIP. 151 

in the banqueting-room. The Constable of Eng- 
land is sick, but not yet too sick for duty. To 
that banqueting-room, where kingship had been 
offered, like sheep obeying the voice of a shepherd, 
the four hundred came at the appointed hour, and 
Oliver says to them : "I look upon this to be the 
great dut}^ of my place, as being set on a watch- 
tower, to see what may be for the good of these 
nations, and what may be for the preventing of 
evil." You are now come, in as great straits 
and difficulties as ever nation was in. It is the 
"being" rather than the well-being that is at 
stake. He pleads for the Protestant cause 
abroad, and tells them that concerns the good 
interests of England ; that the Spaniards have 
been asked to help the Cavaliers ; that the 
" sects " are all striving to be uppermost; that 
it will be wisdom to uphold the "settlement;" 
that he will be ready to stand or fall with them 
in the seemingly promising union ; that he has 
taken his oath to govern according to the laws 
which are now made ; and then he repeats, in 
stronger language than ever, what he has often 
said before : " I sought not this place. I speak 
it before God, angels and men, I did not. You 
sought me for it. You brought me to it." 

The speech was the despairing appeal of a 



152 PARLIAMENT AND KINGSHIP. 

hero, but it accomplished no good. Some of the 
members, indeed, attempt wise legislation : but 
others of the four hundred keep up. for ten days. 
their noise and " yelping " about the form of the 
Government. When on this earth did ever four 
hundred wise men get together and speak wisely ? 

And now the Protector does not call the mem- 
bers to Whitehall. He goes to them. Black 
Rod, sign of his coming and sign that debate 
must stop, appears in the Commons. The Pro- 
tector, it is announced, is in the " other House,'' 
Lords' House ; and there he makes his last Par- 
liament speech. A few months later his voice 
will be forever silent, and England will have no 
one to rule her well : will have, however, a Con- 
vocation that can make about six hundred changes 
in the Prayer Book, to annoy and snub the 
Presbyterians: a Parliament that can pull a hun- 
dred and more lifeless bodies out of their tombs, 
and pack up Baxter, Banyan and an innumerable 
company of non-conformists in jail : and a king 
who deserves to be remembered, because, after 
twenty-five years of misrule, he was able to gasp 
out on his dying bed, the humane wish that Xelly 
might not stawre, and so leave one good record 
of his reign. 

In his last speech Oliver tells the members, 



PARLIAMENT AND KINGSHIP. 153 

rather plainly, what he thinks of them, and what 
a coil they had got him into at the very time 
when the king of Scots is getting ready to in- 
vade England ; and then he dissolves the Parlia- 
ment. In this speech he says : « I can say, in 
the presence of God, in comparison with whom 
we are but like poor creeping ants upon the 
earth, I would have been glad to have lived 
under my woodside, to have kept a flock of 
sheep, rather than undertake such a government 
as this." 

Cant? Hypocrisy? No, my reader. His 
thoughts go back to his old home, to his quiet 
woodside of St. Ives, to the peaceful, pleasant 
memories of his farmer life ; but that life is not 
for him now. He knows that there is no other 
man in England capable of saving it ; and it is 
now doubtful if he can do it. But he must go 
on. Almost at the moment when these pathetic 
words fell from him, the Duke of Ormond, 
Charles's head man, lies concealed in London, 
and the Dutch have hired out ships to bring an 
army over. The Protector's return to private 
life is impossible, so long as he is struck with 
the duty of keeping Charles Stuart out of Eng- 
land. This prince must wait until Cromwell dies, 
and then he can come back ; but he will come to 



154 PARLIAMENT AND KINGSHIP. 

an England which, since his father's day, has 
changed ; an England in which his foul court, 
with its Nell Gwynns and its beastly spectacles, 
will be but as an eruption and a stench on the 
fair face of the country ; an England, too, which 
will have its constitution and its liberty before 
the century has closed, in spite of the restoration 
of this monarch and the succession of his brother 
James. 

Almost immediately after uttering his last 
words to the Parliament, " God be judge be- 
tween you and me," Oliver summons his army 
officers, summons the mayor and council of Lon- 
don, and begins the work of arresting royalist 
ring-leaders. Some are sent to the Tower ; 
death is the penalty of a few ; mercy is accorded 
to the rest. The insurrection is suppressed. " An 
old friend of yours is in town," Oliver said to 
Lord Broghill, " in Drury Lane." " You had bet- 
ter tell him to be gone." The Duke of Ormond 
did not need to be told twice. He was off in a 
twinkle across the Channel, to inform His Sacred 
Majesty that the game was up. 

It is a remark of Bishop Burnet, that it 
was generally believed that Oliver's life and all 
his arts were exhausted at once ; and that had 
he lived longer he could not have held things 



PARLIAMENT AND KINGSHIP. 155 

together. It is to be hoped that the good bishop 
derived comfort from this reflection ; but the 
fact is that Oliver never stood higher or more 
firmly than in the months immediately preced- 
ing his death. It was then that news came of 
great victories abroad ; of Dunkirk taken. It 
was in June, before his life went out, that Louis 
XIV. sent a splendid embassy to congratulate 
the " most invincible of sovereigns," and the 
embassy was still in London with its splendors 
when the clouds gathered in the autumn over 
Hampton Court; in fact, whatever Bishop Bur- 
net's friends related to him, the mere ghost of 
Cromwell, a year after his death, made Cardinal 
Mazarin, the great minister of France, refuse an 
interview with His Majesty, Charles, while he 
" sent his coaches and guards a day's journey, to 
meet Lockhart, the Commonwealth's ambassador. 
The government of Cromwell was not exhausted 
nor was it in the least degree weakened, not- 
withstanding the unwise Parliaments, until he 
ceased to control it; and even' after his death it 
stood for a while on the power which his name 
left with it. 

Thurloe, who knew more of Oliver's plans 
than others, and who, indeed, was the protector 
of the Protector, intimates that another Parlia- 



156 PARLIAMENT AND KINGSHIP. 

ment would have been summoned had not death 
put an end to future efforts, and at the same 
time extinguished all the hopes of the Puritans. 
In the first year of the reign of Victoria, as 
intimated before, an order was issued from the 
court to have annexed to the Prayer Book forms 
of service for use in all the Episcopal Churches 
of the kingdom. One of these services was for 
the " unspeakable mercies " which followed the 
restoration ; and, singularly enough, another of 
them called for praise for the coming into Eng- 
land of King William in safety. The Thanks- 
giving Service, made by act of Parliament in 
Charles's time, was worth preserving as a curious 
piece of history ; but to connect Victoria with 
its collects was a tribute to Charles wholly un- 
called for, and one for which Her Majesty, in 
her mature years, could feel no gratitude. The 
service for the " unspeakable mercies " of the 
restoration is not found now in the English 
Prayer Book ; and the matter is only alluded to 
here to show that adoration of Charles II. and, 
perhaps, contempt for Cromwell, have in late 
years somewhat abated. Cromwell and William 
III. are the men who deserve thanks and praise 
from the sovereigns and from the people of 
England. 



CHAPTER VII. 



FOREIGN POLICY. 



England rose suddenly, under Cromwell, to 
a position among the nations of Europe which 
she had never occupied before ; but within a few 
years of the Protector's death she fell back to 
her old place, and even far below it ; Dutch 
guns were then heard on the banks of the river 
Thames, and Dunkirk became purchasable by 
France. For two hundred years England was 
not so low down in the scale of nations as she 
fell during the reign of Charles II. ; for seven 
hundred and thirty years, from the time of 
William I. to the time of William III., there 
was no rei<m in which she ranked so high as 
during the Protectorate. 

The suddenness of Cromwell's recognition by 
the great powers of the Continent, and the almost 
157 



158 FOREIGN POLICY. 

immediate efforts of botli Spain and France to 
secure his friendship and alliance, give a most 
remarkable proof of his power and of the estima- 
tion in which he was held. He had at once the 
keen diplomatist, Cardinal Mazarin, almost at 
his feet ; he would have no cousinship with 
Louis XIV., but demanded to be addressed as 
monfrere, my brother ; and yet when Beverning, 
the lame ambassador from the States General, 
appeared on political business at Whitehall, 
Oliver offered him a chair just like the one he 
himself sat in; and when Beverning declined to 
take it, Oliver stood and talked as an equal. 
The dignity of the Government must be pre- 
served with the French king ; but dignity must 
yield to kindness with this lame ambassador, 
who would not sit, except in the chair he was 
brought in, and who could not stand because of 
his infirmity. 

The Protector, too, always required the same 
respect to be shown to his representatives abroad 
that had been previously shown to the ministers 
of kings. An amusing illustration of this fact 
may be found in the Thurloe " State Papers." 
Prideaux, Oliver's minister at Moscow, noticed 
that the lords of His Imperial Majesty of Russia 
did not take off their hats for him, and that he 



FOREIGN POLICY. 159 

was asked to take off his sword when he had 
audience with the czar. Prideaux, thereupon, 
told the Russian chancellor that " when he had 
the honor to deliver the Lord Protector's letter 
to His Majesty he was not treated with as repre- 
sentatives of kings were," and that " England 
had not diminished anything of its greatness." 
The chancellor replied that he would report to 
His Majesty, and at the next audience " every- 
thing was done " to Prideaux's satisfaction. " The 
noblemen did rise up uncovered," and all due 
respect was paid to the English Government. 

The czar gave a dinner to Prideaux, and at 
parting said that " I should remember him to 
Oliver Vladitella, to whom he wished good 
health." Vladitella meant Sole Director of 
England, Ireland and Scotland. The letter also 
says that the emperor wrote to Oliver. In one 
thing, however, Prideaux appears to have failed. 
He said to the chancellor that Oliver would like 
to know why the czar was making war against 
the Poles. It would seem that Oliver had 
enough to occupy his thoughts without interest- 
ing himself in Poland. The date of Prideaux's 
letter — a letter which is quite as entertaining 
as the narratives in historical novels — is March 
17, 1654. 



160 FOREIGN POLICY. 

Among the letters intercepted on their way to 
France was one written soon after the acceptance 
of the Protectorate, which defines the position 
which Oliver held in connection with the Euro- 
pean powers. " The Protector," says the letter, 
" the craftiest man in all Christendom, hath 
made himself the greatest prince in the world, 
to whom kings must do homage ; and the princes 
situated the farthest off will be glad to be united 
to him." This letter was written to Mr. Patin, 
a Paris merchant, and it contained the truth 
touching Oliver's influence and power. The 
princes near and those far off were all inclined, 
or forced, to pay the Protector homage ; some of 
them desired to be closely connected with him. 
Sweden early sent its congratulations ; in 1654 
Spain, still the strongest power in Europe, offered 
" an offensive and defensive alliance ; " yet earlier, 
Denmark sent an ambassador to London. 

A Copenhagen letter says : " In case the treaty 
with the Dutch should not succeed, then this 
king " (of Denmark) " will apply to the Pro- 
tector of England." 

Embassies were then what they are not in our 
day. Forty gentlemen accompanied the Dutch 
ambassadors to Whitehall, twenty of whom 
were expecting " to have the honor to kiss the 



FOREIGN POLICY. 161 

Protector's hand." His Highness, one of the 
ambassadors reports, declined the kissing, but 
he " bowed to all the gentlemen, one by one." 

France, not for love of Oliver, but in fear of 
him, submitted to England ; and was kept in an 
attitude of deference, as already related, even 
for a year subsequent to the Protector's death. 
Portugal, Tuscany, Venice, Genoa, Tunis, Al- 
giers, and the Mediterranean pirates followed in 
the train of the greater European powers, and 
by treaties or alliances, paid their homage to the 
St. Ives farmer, who, through the whole of this 
illustrious foreign work, and the honors which he 
gained, was acting as a constable at home, watch- 
ing and defeating plotting royalists; watching 
and defeating the unwise movements of his 
Parliaments. 

Oliver was fortunate in securing to aid him, 
in his foreign work, two men, one of whom will 
always be remembered and honored in the British 
navy ; while the other, neglected and almost for- 
gotten, deserves to have his name written on the 
pages of history with the names of the most able 
and faithful of diplomatists. Blake and Thurloe 
were the fittest selections that could be made ; 
the one for work at sea, the other for work in 
council. Oliver had the reputation not only of 



162 FOEEIGN POLICY. 

knowing what material a soldier should be made 
of, but also of seeing generally into the charac- 
ters of men ; and two could not have been found 
more competent to assist him than his admiral 
and his devoted secretary. Blake was a country 
gentleman of the good English type ; a Puritan, 
but one who could laugh, blunt in manner, free 
from fear, inflexible in duty, and a man who 
could obey Oliver in the Spanish business with a 
clear conscience. 

The immense volumes of "State Papers" left 
by John Thurloe give proof of his great ability, 
his wonderful industry, and his devotion to the 
Protector. Cecil was not more watchful over 
Queen Elizabeth than Thurloe over Oliver. In- 
deed, it may be doubted if the Protector would 
have lived to do his work but for the spies whom 
Thurloe kept, and the intercepted letters which 
he placed in Cromwell's hands. Plot after plot 
against the Government failed ; but it is probable 
that some of these plots would have been success- 
ful if Thurloe had had less clear sight, less energy, 
and a less strong will. 

In the year 1831 the great magician of fiction, 
the enchanter of his age, published, in an English 
review, this gloomy statement : " The large collec- 
tion, called Thurloe's ' State Papers,' containing 



FOREIGN POLICY. 163 

the most authentic materials respecting the period 
of the great civil war and of Cromwell's domi- 
nation, was, not long since, and perhaps still is 
to be purchased at something little higher than 
the price of waste paper." Thurloe's seven folio 
volumes, which the present writer has used in 
preparing this little book, weigh about forty or 
fifty pounds avoirdupois, and would be worth, 
delivered at a paper mill, less than one dollar ; 
for historical purposes these volumes have a 
value which cannot be measured by money. The 
annals left by Julius Caesar are not more precious 
to the student of Roman history than are these 
papers to the student of English history. 

Cromwell and Thurloe evidently were not in 
demand in the English market in the year 1831. 
In truth the Protector was then an object only 
to be seen through royalist mediums, and in 
royalist sewers ; a disgusting, ill-tempered, whin- 
ing, hypocritical creature ; a " grand imposter " 
who rose " by his subtle arts in praying, preach- 
ing, groaning and howling to the highest pitch 
of sovereignty;" a "monster" lacking all good 
qualities ; a " bad man," consigned to hell by 
Lord Clarendon, and by Southey stopped just 
on the edge. 

Sir Walter, you thought, when you were writ- 



164 FOREIGN POLICY. 

ing the sentence which we have quoted, that 
" Waverley " and " Woodstock," with their artistic 
pictures, would always be worth more than a 
penny a pound. You did not dream that some 
readers, within a period of sixty years, finding' 
these stories not to contain real history, would 
value them at the " price of waste paper," and 
be looking into Thurloe for true and vivid pict- 
ures of the past, and for a wonderful accumula- 
tion of " the most authentic materials respecting 
the period of the great civil war, and of Crom- 
well's domination." For a historical novel, with 
truth for its basis, no one work of the seventeenth 
century would, we believe, supply so much matter 
as Thurloe's. And as to history, it is enough to 
say that Thurloe's " letters of intelligence," " in- 
tercepted letters," once secret letters written with 
lemon juice, letters written in cipher, which dis- 
close their contents to sharp eyes in Whitehall 
Palace, reports of foreign ministers, reports of 
spies, etc., have supplied Samuel E. Gardiner 
with no small part of the material which he has 
used in the preparations of his " History of the 
Great Civil War." Thurloe is no longer in the 
waste paper basket. 

It was impossible that Oliver should leave out 
of sight, in his foreign policy, the commercial 



FOREIGN POLICY. 165 

and material interests of England ; but it was as 
the Protector of Protestantism, and the avenger 
of those who in his view were, to use Milton's 
words, " slaughtered saints " that he became con- 
spicuous and powerful. It was not for the com- 
merce, or aggrandizement of his country that he 
chiefly lived, but for the championship of what 
he believed to be religion. It was love for the 
people of his country, love as simple and as pure 
as was Washington's, that guided him. 

It was not so much to make the nation great 
that he labored, but to make it safe and happy. 
The glory of England was a result of his polity ; 
it was not its object. He would have put him- 
self at the head of the Protestants of Europe 
had it been in his power to unite them ; failing 
in that, relying on himself, on Blake, on his Iron- 
sides, and on God, he determines to do what he 
can to lessen the power of Rome, and especially 
to cripple the blood-stained hand of the king of 
Spain. His sincerity in this no one who knows 
what his education had been, and what his letters 
and speeches reveal, can for a moment doubt. 
One distinguished Roman Catholic writer, Lin- 
gard the historian, has acknowledged his honesty. 
" Dissembling in religion," he says, " is contra- 
dicted by the uniform tenor of his life." 



166 FOREIGN POLICY. 

Within a few months of his admission to the 
Protectorate, Oliver signed treaties of peace with 
three Protestant nations, Denmark, Sweden and 
Holland ; and had the Church of Rome and 
Philip IV. of Spain been tolerant, the war flags 
of the navy would probably have been furled, 
leaving Blake no duty except that of compelling 
Tunis, Algiers and Tripoli to stop their piracies, 
and to release the English captives whom they 
held. 

Spain, in the middle of the seventeenth cent- 
ury, though growing weaker year by year, was 
still, perhaps, the strongest nation on the conti- 
nent, and she was still, as she had been for a long 
period, the terror of Protestants. Her Inquisi- 
tion, though not in full vigor in Oliver's day, yet 
continued its work of burning Christians, and it 
yet added mercilessly to the hundreds of thou- 
sands whom it had imprisoned, sometimes to the 
annoyance of English sea captains, and traders 
in Spanish ports. The Armada had proved a 
failure, and the Thirty Years' War had ended. 

Austria could no longer hope to overthrow the 
German followers of Luther ; but France, little 
inclined to toleration, was rising into power, and 
the question, Shall Roman Catholicism be domi- 
nant in Europe, and continue its torturing prac- 



FOREIGN POLICY. 167 

tices ? was not fully settled. At least so it 
appeared to Oliver, and the revocation of the 
Edict of Nantes, a crime and a horror impos- 
sible daring the Protectorate, gives support to 
his opinion. 

He has been criticised for not seeing that the 
danger was over ; for still holding, in the middle 
of the seventeenth century, the ideas which pre- 
vailed among Puritan Englishmen at the out- 
break, in his youth, of the Thirty Years' War. 
It is enough to say that he fully believed, as he 
wrote to his admirals, that " the Lord had a con- 
troversy with that Romish Babylon of which the 
Spaniard is the great under-propper ; " and that 
he believed what he said to his Parliament of 
1654, "you have on your shoulders the interests 
of all Christian people in the world." The cor- 
rectness of his view may be disputed ; but his 
honesty, which alone we here wish to prove, is too 
evident to admit of dispute. Under these cir- 
cumstances and with his convictions, the Pro- 
tector, as his speeches and letters indicate, con- 
sidered it a part of his business not only to keep 
guard over Protestants wherever he could reach 
them by his authority or prestige, but also, if 
possible, to put it out of the power of princes to 
persecute them. Striking illustrations of his 



168 FOEEIGN POLICY. 

efficiency in this line of policy will presently be 
given ; but we must now, for a page or two, fol- 
low the fortunes of Blake. 

The first work of Admiral Blake at sea was 
to blockade, for six months, Prince Rupert in 
Kinsale Harbor, Ireland; and on the escape of 
the prince to follow him to the Tagus to blockade 
him again. The king of Portugal interfering, 
he burned three of his ships, captured seventeen 
of them and sailed for home. He soon made 
sail again, found the royalist fleet in the harbor 
of Malaga and destroyed it. He next took the 
Scilly Islands. In the Dutch war he was at 
the outset defeated by Von Tromp who had an 
overwhelming force ; in the sequel he conquered 
the Dutch commander. 

In November, 1654, he is sent by Oliver to 
the Mediterranean to bring the Duke of Tus- 
cany, the Knights of Malta and the piratical 
States of northern Africa to terms. The Dey of 
Tunis, in scorn, resisted and bade the admiral 
" behold his castles." Blake sailed into the harbor, 
within musket shot of the castles, fired nine of the 
Dey's ships, and brought the pirate to a treaty. 

War with Spain followed ; and after cruising 
off Cadiz and the Spanish coast for a while, 
Blake, though in poor health, started his fleet 



FOREIGN POLICY. 169 

for Santa Cruz, in Teneriffe, where in the bay, 
lying in crescent shape, he found sixteen Spanish 
vessels, the Plate Fleet, at anchor under the shelter 
of the guns of the castle and several forts. He 
entered the bay, poured his broadsides in every 
direction and soon the gold ships became useless 
charred hulks. Even Clarendon does not with- 
hold a sort of praise for this exploit. He says, 
"The whole action was so incredible that all 
men who knew the place wondered that any 
sober man, with what courage soever endowed, 
would ever have undertaken it." 

This was the last naval engagement of this 
great captain. He recrossed the Atlantic, but 
not for repose and honors in England. He 
sailed again for the coast of Spain, sailed there 
for duty, for his love of country, to use his own 
words, " to hinder foreigners from fooling us." 
Failing health, however, at last compelled him to 
return to his native shores, but he was not to 
see them ; he died when his ship was entering 
the harbor of Plymouth. The annals of naval 
warfare contain few, if any, more honored names 
than that of Robert Blake. 

At the time when the English fleet sailed for 
the Mediterranean, Oliver dispatched another 
fleet with secret orders directing an attack on 



170 FOREIGN POLICY. 

St. Domingo ; the expedition proved a failure 
as regards that island, but it secured for Eng- 
land her first possession in that part of the world 
where Spain had made those vast acquisitions 
which aided in making her the most conspicuous 
empire in Europe, but which could not save her 
from sinking, before the end of the seventeenth 
century, to a second-rate power. Jamaica was 
added to the British Colonies. 

While these new and strange things were go- 
ing on at sea, Oliver was proving his strength 
on the Continent by acts to which the Catholic 
powers were not accustomed, and which somewhat 
startled them. The Duke of Savoy had begun a 
massacre of his Protestant subjects in the Alpine 
mountains, and while Milton "called on God to 
avenge his slaughtered saints," Cromwell deter- 
mined to interfere. 

Clarendon's account of this affair is worth 
transcribing. " Cromwell's greatness at home 
was but a shadow of the glory he had abroad. 
It was hard to discover which feared him most, 
France, Spain, or the Low Countries, where his 
friendship was current at the value he put upon 
it. As they did all sacrifice their honor and 
their interest to his pleasure, so there is noth- 
ing he could have demanded that either of them 



FOREIGN POLICY. 171 

would have denied him. To manifest which, there 
needs only two instances. The first is when those 
of the valley of Lucerne had unwarily rebelled 
against the Duke of Savoy, which gave occasion 
to the Pope and the neighbor princes of Italy to 
call and solicit for their extirpation ; and their 
prince positively resolved upon it, Cromwell sent 
his agent to the Duke of Savoy, a prince with 
whom he had no correspondence or commerce, 
and so engaged the cardinal " (Mazarin) " and 
even terrified the Pope himself, without so much 
as doing any grace to the English Roman Catho- 
lics (nothing being more usual than his saying 
that his ships in the Mediterranean should visit 
Civita Vecchia, and that the sound of his cannon 
should be heard in Rome), that the Duke of 
Savoy thought it necessary to restore all that he 
had taken from them, and did renew all those 
privileges they had formerly enjoyed and newly 
forfeited." 

It will be seen from this extract that the Pro- 
tector, in this case, acted simply as a constable 
to keep the peace for Protestants. But Claren- 
don does not give the whole of the story. When 
the news of the persecution reached him, Oliver 
was about to sign a treaty which he desired with 
Louis XIV. of France. The day had come for 



172 FOREIGN POLICY. 

the signing of the treaty, bat the Protector re- 
fused to put his name to it unless the French 
king will promise to assist him in putting a stop 
to the Duke of Savoy's atrocities. Milton, his 
Latin secretary, now blind, sends out letters to 
the Protestant States, and writes his immortal 
sonnet. Louis yields. Cardinal Mazarin reluc- 
tantly informs the Duke of Savoy that the exiles 
who have been left alive by his soldiers must be 
permitted to return to their homes. Oliver him- 
self sends two thousand pounds for their relief ; 
a day of religious service is appointed ; collections 
aggregating a very large amount of money are 
taken in the churches of England. The Lord 
Protector is said to have melted into weeping on 
this occasion ; if so the fire of a righteous anger 
must soon have dried his tears. 

It was a daring and a noble act which he 
accomplished, and not a common one, surely, in 
the history of rulers. It is related that the Duke 
of Savo} r , after having been thus checkmated, 
sent for the Protector's picture to hang in his 
gallery. No wonder, for he had an eye for a 
brave man ; and very likely he was, at heart, as 
compassionate as Oliver, and as honest in his 
work. It would be an error* to suppose that all 
those who burned heretics w r ere more wicked than 



FOREIGN POLICY. 173 

other men. It was a duty with many of them 
to cleanse the Church. Even Isabella, to whom 
Columbus was so much indebted, a gentlewoman, 
who made the Castile court "a nursery of virtue," 
and the purity of whose piety no one can doubt, 
was the nurturing mother of the Inquisition ; that 
organization to her was sacred ; and a sacred duty 
it may have seemed to the Duke of Savoy to 
persecute the heretics of his dominion. At any 
rate he deserves a white mark for sending for 
Oliver's picture. 

" The other instance of his authority," says 
Clarendon, " was yet greater and more incred- 
ible," and "nobody can wonder that Cromwell's 
memory remains still, in those parts (Nismes and 
its vicinity in France), and with those people, in 
great veneration." The facts, condensed, are the 
following : " In the city of Nismes, . . . where 
those of the religion do most abound, there was 
a great faction . . . when the consuls (who 
are the chief magistrates) were to be chosen. 
Those of the reformed religion " (the Huguenots) 
" had the confidence to set up one of themselves 
for that magistracy, which they of the Roman 
religion resolved to oppose with all their power. 
The dissension between them made so much noise 
that the intendant of the province, who is the 



174 FOREIGN POLICY. 

chief magistrate in all civil affairs throughout 
the whole province, went thither to prevent any 
disorder that might happen. When the day of 
election came, those of the religion possessed 
themselves, with many armed men, of the town- 
house, where the election was to be made. The 
magistrate sent to know what their meaning was, 
to which they answered they were there to give 
their voices for the choice of the new consul, and 
to be sure that the election should be fairly made. 
The bishop of the city, the intendant of the 
province, and all the officers of the church, and 
the present magistrate of the town, went together 
in their robes to be present at the election, with- 
out any suspicion that there would be any force 
used. When they came near the gate of the 
town-house, which was shut, and they supposed 
would be opened when they came, they within 
poured out a volley of musket-shot upon them, 
by which the dean of the church, and two or 
three of the magistrates of the town were killed 
upon the place, and very many others wounded ; 
whereby some died shortly after." 

An account of this transaction was sent to 
the court at Paris, and " the court was glad of 
the occasion, and resolved that this provocation 
. . . should warrant all kinds of severity in that 



FOREIGN POLICY. 175 

city, even to the pulling down their temples, and 
expelling many of them for ever out of the city, 
which with the execution and forfeiture of many 
of the principal persons would be a general mor- 
tification of all of the religion in France, with 
whom they were heartily offended ; and a part 
of the army was forthwith ordered to march 
toward Nismes, to see this executed with the 
utmost rigor." 

Probably this account from Clarendon might 
have been modified by a Huguenot eye-witness ; 
but, admitting that the facts were as stated, the 
power of the Protector is made the more remark- 
able. " Those of the religion in the town " at 
once sent to the magistrates to excuse themselves, 
and to impute what had been done to the rash- 
ness of particular men, who had no order for 
what they did. " The magistrates replied that 
they could do nothing till the king's pleasure be 
known." 

The Huguenots " very well knew what the 
king's pleasure " would be ; and so they sent a 
Scotchman, one Moulins, " to Cromwell, to desire 
his protection and interposition." Cromwell re- 
plied to the messenger that he " would take care 
of the business," and " that night " he sent another 
messenger to his ambassador, Lockhart, " who 



176 FOREIGN POLICY. 

by the time Moulin s came thither " (to Paris) 
" had so far prevailed with the cardinal, that 
orders were sent to stop the troops, which were 
upon their march toward Nismes." A full 
pardon and amnesty were secured from the king. 
Such is Clarendon's narrative, and he adds : 
" Cromwell would never suffer himself to be 
denied anything he ever asked of Cardinal 
Mazarin." 

It is impossible to recall this incident, and 
forget what occurred in France twenty years 
later. Could Cromwell and his Ironsides have 
lived till 1685, there would have been no " Invo- 
cation of the Edict of Nantes." Madame cle 
Maintenon would have pleaded in vain with 
Louis XIV. to expiate his sins by pronouncing 
sentence against the Huguenots. In the failure 
of diplomacy, an English army would have 
planted its standards before the walls of Paris, 
to which, if need were, a hundred thousand Pro- 
testants from the million or more in the country, 
would have rallied ; and that calamity which 
deprived France of its best citizens, and drove 
women and children into exile, would have been 
averted. 

At the court of Louis XIV., England, daring 
the Protectorate, was represented by William 



FOREIGN POLICY. 177 

Lockhart, a Scotchman, a soldier, an ambassador 
who had no superior, probably no equal, in his 
age ; a man worthy to serve under Oliver, and 
in company with Thurloe and Milton. His 
abilities were great enough to obliterate the 
memory of his connection with the Common- 
wealth, and to secure for him from Charles II., 
after all was over with the Protectorate, the 
same place in the French court, which he had 
held under Cromwell. A new treaty, which he 
made with Louis, resulted in the last triumph 
for England, connected with the Protector's 
administration. It was agreed that six thousand 
men of the English army should join the French 
forces for an attack on the Spanish army in the 
Netherlands. The Protector had two objects in 
view : to cripple Spain, and to secure for Eng- 
land a harbor or two on the coast opposite the 
Channel, which would aid him in the event of 
attempted royalist invasions. Under date of 
August 31, 1657, he wrote Lockhart: "This 
action will probably divert the Spaniards from 
assisting Charles Stuart in any attempt on us ; " 
and this also he wrote : " If the French be so 
false to us, as that they would not have us have 
any footing " (harbor town as pay for aid ren- 
dered) " then ask for payment of our expenses, 



178 FOREIGN POLICY. 

and draw off our men." It was at this time 
that Frenchmen are reported to have said : 
"The cardinal is more afraid of Oliver than of 
the devil." 

The expedition was successful ; but while 
London and all England was celebrating its vic- 
tories, and rejoicing especially over the acquisition 
of Dunkirk, Oliver, broken down by grief, was 
ministering at the bedside of his daughter Eliza- 
beth, and the time was drawing near when his 
mighty spirit must end its earthly mission. 

It was the aim of the Protector, in all his 
foreign policy, to unite Protestant Europe with 
England, in one great, effectual league. Euro- 
pean polities and accessions of power to the 
Commonwealth centered in his mind about that 
to him desirable and even necessary result. It 
has been said that his pious enthusiasm in this 
particular, deceived and misguided him. It has 
been affirmed that he was misled by the conser- 
vative and unspeculative temper of his mind, as 
well as by the strength of his religious enthu- 
siasm. Of the change in the world around him, 
remarks a late historian. Cromwell kk seems to 
have discovered nothing." Perhaps so, but we 
must question the truth of the statement. It is 
impossible that Oliver should have kept his eyes 



rOBEIGB POLICY. 179 

shut daring the Thirty Years 1 War. He cer- 
tainly discovered not a little daring the time of 
the Protectorate. Although he may not hi 
learned through Prideans all the plana and pur- 
poses of the czar, he probably know as much 
about Russian policy as modern diplomatists. 
The changes in the world were known and com- 
prehended in the cabins at Plymouth, on tljo 
banks of the Connecticut, in the settlement at 
Boston, through the numerous pamphlets of* the 
time ; that Oliver, with these and the thousands 
of Thurloe documents within his sight, was igno- 
rant of them, is incredible. The work of G 
Adolphus was as closely watched by intelligent 
Puritans as was Giant's work or Lee's work in 
our civil war. Wo venture I it that 

Oliver know as much of what was going on in 
Germany and adjacent countries as the modern 
historian who writes about these matters. How 
Wallenstein, in the interests of popery, had over- 
run Brandenburg and Denmark, and how Grus- 
tavus, in the face of the laughter of European 
generals, had landed his little army on the coast 
of Pomerania, and begun the exploits which have 
immortalized his name; how the army of Tilly, 
the great commander-in-chief of the Catholic 
League, was crushed, and the power of Austria 



180 FOREIGN POLICY. 

broken ; how Protestantism was saved, and Gus- 
tavus was recognized as its liberator, Oliver well 
knew ; and did he not also know that the same 
spirit which had inspired the Thirty Years' 
War, and which had made a wilderness of the 
Protestant parts of Germany, still existed in 
Spain, in France, and in half the countries of 
Europe, at the time when he was Protector? It 
is easy for a historian, with a touch of his pen, 
to question Cromwell's statesmanship touching 
this matter of a Protestant League, and to say 
that he was behind his age ; and it is quite as 
easy to affirm, as we do, that a combination of 
the Protestant countries for common protection, 
was not an unwise policy ; and that, had such a 
league as Cromwell desired and labored for, been 
secured, the history of the Huguenots, who after 
the time of the Protector, under the fatal rule of 
Louis, were subjected to the most merciless perse- 
cutions, and finally scattered as exiles in the 
Protestant parts of Europe, and on the shores of 
America, might have been, probably would have 
been, quite different from that history which, 
after the lapse of two centuries, is now read with 
a shudder and with indignation. 

Protector of England, and, on a limited scale, 
Protector of the Protestants of Europe, Oliver 



FOREIGN POLICY. 181 

was also the protector of the New England Col- 
onies ; and the only English protector which these 
colonies ever had. 

In the line of English rulers, from James I. 
to William IV., there was not one, save Cromwell, 
who is entitled to our grateful remembrance. 
The debt which we owe to James I. and to his 
son Charles is not a debt of gratitude. To them 
we are indebted for exiling our forefathers ; but 
these Stuarts have no claim on our love. To 
Cromwell, on the other hand, may be traced 
the peace and security which for a short period 
were enjoyed by the Pilgrims and adventurers in 
their perilous enterprise of establishing them- 
selves, and of creating governments better for 
them than the Government from which they 
fled ; and to Cromwell may be traced, through 
papers and letters which now exist, the kind 
wish to remove to a more congenial place the 
suffering colonists. Happily, the scheme failed, 
but its failure detracts nothing from the benevo- 
lence of the Protector. He alone of all En£- 
lish sovereigns pursued a wise and kind policy 
toward the colonies of America ; and if Massa- 
chusetts and Connecticut allow the year 1899, 
the anniversary of Cromwell's birth, to pass with- 
out erecting monuments of some sort to perpetu- 






182 FOREIGN POLICY. 

ate his name, that duty will be done in 1999, if 
there are then in New England men who can 
recognize ability, goodness, heroism, and also 
recognize a debt due to the most neglected, the 
most defamed, and yet one of the most illustrious 
of Englishmen. 



CHAPTER VIII. 



LATER DOMESTIC LIFE. 



From the year 1G40, when Cromwell left Ely 
for London, to the spring of 1654, when the 
royal apartments of Whitehall were assigned 
him as his residence, his domestic life was con- 
stantly interrupted ; and for this period there is 
little to be related, except in connection with 
domestic duties, which, in the case of his son 
Richard, occupied a great deal of thought and 
time. There are no records of visits to the home 
where he had left his family, and but few records 
of his life when he was in London. For a time, 
previous to 1646, he appears to have lived in 
lodgings in Drury Lane, then a fashionable 
quarter ; and some time during that year he took 
a house in King Street, not far from the Abbey. 
To this house he brought his family, or a part of 
183 



184 LATER DOMESTIC LIFE. 

it. The next change probably was to the Cock- 
pit, a part of Whitehall. Oliver's Dunbar letter 
to his wife, dated September, 1654, indicates that 
she was living' there, and it was in that house, 
not in the royal rooms of Whitehall, that the 
famous conference, preceding the breaking up 
of the Long Parliament, was held in April, 
1653. 

It was an interesting family that Oliver could 
gather at his side in his hours of leisure ; an 
aged mother, a wife " dearer than any creature," 
four daughters, and his sons, Richard and Henry. 
The name of Richard is not a pleasant one to 
meet on the pages of English history ; but, after 
all, Richard was a good specimen of a clever, 
agreeable Englishman, a clubbable sort of young 
man. The chief fault to be found with him is 
that he was not strong enough, not able enough 
to carry his father's constable baton. Carlyle, 
without mercy, scornfully surnames him, " Poor 
Idle Triviality ; " but Carlyle, we know, was not 
sparing of his adjectives or black paint when 
he really disliked one. Henry was an able man, 
and possibly had the baton fallen to him, he 
would have established a House of Cromwell to 
last as long as the Plantagenet, or Tudor, or 
Stuart houses. 



LATER DOMESTIC LIFE. 185 

All the daughters were married when young. 
Elizabeth became Mrs. Claypole. Bridget became 
the wife of Ireton, a brave soldier and an able 
writer; he was left by Cromwell in Ireland 
as his deputy, and there he died. Mary and 
Frances, " two little wenches," as Oliver calls 
them, whom he wants to provide for when he is 
arranging Richard's marriage money contracts, 
were young enough to enjoy the glories of the 
royal parts of Whitehall, at its occupation. 
They were there two or three years, when the 
" musical, glib-tongued Mary " (whom Dean Swift 
pronounced handsome, and like her father), was 
married to Lord Fauconberg ; and " poor little 
Fanny," after much trouble and perplexity (some 
jealous lover having put it into His Highness's 
head that Rich was not just the right kind of a 
man), to the son of Lord Rich. 

These domesticities, of which history contains 
but few records, but in which Oliver, a loving 
father, shared, were preceded by Richard's mar- 
riage to Dorothy Mayor, in 1649. Touching 
this matter and touching Richard, we find in 
Carlyle's book nineteen letters which illustrate 
Cromwell's character and give an idea of him as 
a business man. His patience, his anxiety, his 
fair and open dealing, his generosity, his thought 



186 LATER DOMESTIC LIFE. 

for his two little girls — then about ten and 
twelve years old — are seen distinctly in his cor- 
respondence. He is too busy a man to see Mr. 
Mayor, Dorothy's father ; has too much to do in 
Parliament, and in preparation for the second 
civil war, to leave time for going to Hursley ; and 
so Oliver gets Colonel Norton, " Dick Norton," 
and other friends, to manage the matter. 

In his first letter to the colonel he writes that 
he has had " an offer of a great proposition from 
a father of his daughter, yet I rather incline to 
this" (the Mayor alliance) "in my thoughts; 
because, though the other be very far greater, 
yet I see different ties, and not that assurance of 
Godliness, though, indeed, of fairness." 

He declines, then, the great offer, and proceeds 
to get his son married into a family which has no 
rank, and but little property. " The considera- 
tion of piety in the parents," he writes to Norton, 
and " such hopes of the gentlewoman in that re- 
sj)ect make the business to me a great mercy." 

O, Oliver ! should your like appear in the 
domestic marrying world of this year, 1892, he 
would be looked upon as a pious prodigy. A 
place, perhaps, would be found for him by one 
of our ambitious religious organizations at the 
Columbian Chicago Exposition. 



LATER DOMESTIC LIFE. 187 

Whether Oliver managed to get time to go to 
the wedding, this writer does not know ; but after 
he had got his army ready for Ireland, and was 
on his way with it, he wrote at Bristol, July 12, 
1649, to Mr. Mayor, that he is " very glad to 
hear that our children have so good leisure to 
make a journey to eat cherries." Richard and 
Dorothy have evidently been off on a little pleas- 
ure excursion. In this letter Oliver writes, " I 
have delivered my son up to you, and I hope you 
will counsel him ; he will need it. ... I 
hope I shall have your prayers in the business 
to which I am called." The business was the 
war in Ireland. 

A few days later, " From aboard the John," 
he writes to his "beloved daughter" Dorothy, 
" I do entirely love you, . . . and I hope a 
word of advice will not be unwelcome, nor un- 
acceptable to thee." The advice touches religion. 
" I desire you both to make it, above all things, 
your business to seek the Lord," etc. This does 
not confirm the impression that Cromwell entirely 
parted with his piety when he became a great man, 

Let us now try to get a glimpse of Whitehall 
as it was in Oliver's day. There was no Mr. 
Pepys in the gallery of the banqueting-room to 
give us such vivid sketches as he left of the 



188 LATER DOMESTIC LIFE. 

garish beauties and the gay cavaliers who sur- 
rounded His Sacred Majesty, Charles II., a few 1 
years later; but there are pictures in Thurloe's 
" State Papers " worth reproducing, and with what 
we know of the men who resorted to Oliver, and 
when we think of the household there — of Eliza- 
beth Clay pole, of the old mother, of the dear 
wife, of Oliver himself, and others — it is easy to 
create pictures of the scenes in that Protectorate 
palace. 

Thurloe, in one of those enormous volumes 
which good Sir Walter Scott has told us the 
value of in his da}^, has a letter written by one 
of the Dutch ambassadors, Jongestall, to His 
Excellency, William Frederick, Earl of Nassau, 
containing an account of a dinner given to the 
three Dutch ambassadors at Whitehall, on the 
proclaiming of peace, ..April 27, 1654. If the old 
dates are correct, this dinner was given just a 
fortnight after Mrs. Cromwell had taken her 
place in the royal establishment ; and rather an 
anxious time it must have been for her. The old 
mother was yet alive, and bright enough to be 
interested in what was going on; but she evi- 
dently did not accompany the Lady Protectress 
to the dinner table ; and yet, though verging to 
her ninety-fourth year, she very likely caught the 



LATER DOMESTIC LIFE. 189 

sound of her son's voice when he was singing 
after the feast. Perhaps that sound carried her 
back to the Huntingdon home, and Oliver's boy- 
hood. It was a remarkable diplomatic festivo- 
gathering in that one particular of the Protec- 
tor's giving out a metrical psalm, by lines, and 
leading the singing himself. 

How ke got on with the Paris ambassadors, 
at dinner, when they came to London, history 
does not tell us ; but he certainly would omit 
psalm singing with Cardinal Mazarin's nephews, 
or with any representatives of Louis XIV. These 
pious Dutch ambassadors, however, liked it. 

Jongestall's letter is dated April 28. " Yester- 
day," he writes, " about one o'clock in the fore- 
noon, the peace was proclaimed before Whitehall, 
Temple Bar, Paul's Church, and the Old Ex- 
change. That same day, at night, the guns went 
off at the Tower, and aboard the ships three times, 
and bonfires were made, according to the custom 
of the country, before Whitehall, up and down the 
city. We did the like on the back side of our 
houses, toward the river, and burned near eighty 
pitch barrels ; and we had trumpeters and others 
to play all the while. The river was so full of 
boats that there was hardly any water to be 
seen ; at the same time several lords and ladies 



190 LATER DOMESTIC LIFE. 

of quality came to see us, whom we treated. 
In sum, all things were clone here in great 
solemnity. God Almighty give us further bless- 
ing to this great work ! Yesterday, at noon, we 
were invited to dinner, by His Highness, the 
Lord Protector, where we were nobly entertained. 
Mr. Strickland and the master of ceremonies 
came to fetch us in two coaches of His Highness, 
about half an hour past one, and brought us to 
Whitehall, where twelve trumpeters were ready 
sounding against our coming. My Lady Nieu- 
port and my wife were brought to His Highness 
presently ; the one by Mr. Strickland, and the 
other by the master of ceremonies, who received 
us with great demonstrations of amity. After we 
staid a little, we were conducted into another 
room where we found a table ready covered. His 
Highness sat on one side of it alone ; my Lord 
Beverning, Nieuport and myself at the upper end, 
and the Lord President Lawrence and others 
next to us. There was in the same room another 
table, covered, for other Lords of the Council, and 
others. At the table of my Lady Protectrice 
dined my Lady Nieuport, my wife, my Lady 
Lambert, my Lord Protector's daughter " ( Eliza- 
beth) "and mine. The music played all the 
while we were at dinner. The Lord Protector 



LATER DOMESTIC LIFE. 191 

had us into another room where the Lady Pro- 
tective and others came to us, where we had 
also music and voices, and a psalm sung which 
His Highness gave us, and told us that it was 
yet the best paper that had been exchanged be- 
tween us ; and from thence we were had into a 
gallery next the river, where we walked with His 
Highness about half an hour, and then took our 
leaves, and were conducted back again to our 
houses after the same manner we were brought." 

Jongestall adds, in a postscript, that the Lord 
Protector showed a great deal of kindness to his 
wife and daughter. This picture of Jongestall's 
lacks the fine touches and the colorings of a his- 
torical novelist like Scott, but it has, at least, 
the merit of accuracy. 

Within three weeks of the time of this dinner, 
the domestic life of the Whitehall household was 
disturbed by a plot for the assassination of the 
Protector. It was arranged that on Saturday, 
the twentieth of May, when on his way in his 
coach to Hampton Court, thirty men should 
attack his guards, kill him, and proclaim Charles 
king. But it happened, much to the comfort of 
Mrs. Cromwell and the children, some of whom 
would probably have taken the drive with their 
father on that pleasant May day, that Thurloe, 



192 LATER DOMESTIC LIFE. 

who was Argus-eyed, was able to seize five of 
the plotters " in the very birth-time of their 
hour." A capital scheme, but one may read, 
in the moldy folios of Rush worth, lamentations 
over the fate of some of the conspirators. Som- 
erset pleaded, guilty and was saved ; Gerrard and 
Vowel were executed. 

One of the chief occupations of European 
kings, for centuries past, has been recreation, 
and particularly in the line of killing animals 
and birds. Louis XVI., a prisoner in Paris, 
deeply regretted the loss of his gaming privi- 
leges ; Pepys, seeking Charles II. to consult 
about naval matters, would find that the king 
had gone to hunt. The history of rulers for 
three hundred years, apart from war, is mainly 
the history of diversions. Not so with Oliver. 
He once, however, we know, went hawking, and 
once went on a picnic. The picnic was in Hyde 
Park, a more quiet and secluded place two hun- 
dred j^ears ago than now. He took Thurloe and 
a few friends with his six new horses, a gift of 
the Duke of Oldenburg, and after a lunch at- 
tempted to drive himself, with the results of 
injury to Thurloe, to himself, and the discharge 
of a pistol which he carried. There were no 
newspaper reporters around at the time of this 



LATER DOMESTIC LIFE. 193 

accident ; but the three solid Dutch ambassadors, 
who still lingered in London after their famous 
dinner, wrote to the States General the full par- 
ticulars, which can be read in the Thurloe " State 
Papers." Carlyle says : " Small anecdote that 

figures larger than life in all the books and biog- 
© © © 

rapines. I have known men thrown from their 
horses on occasion, and less noise made about it, 
my erudite friend. But the essential point was, 
His Highness wore a pistol. Yes, His Highness 
is prepared to defend himself; has men, and also 
devils and devils' servants of various 
kinds to defend himself against, and wears pistols, 
and what other furniture, outward and inward, 
may be necessary to that object." 

The court at Whitehall, in the time of the 
Protectorate, must have presented scenes to an 
observer's eye quite in contrast with those at St. 
Germain's, and in most of the palaces of Europe. 
The age was one when the keeping of a mistress 
or two by a ruler, however pious and devoted to 
the church he might be, seemed to be expected. 
That was almost the universal rule ; and in one 
case a king, who loved his wife only, is said to 
have conformed to it in deference to public 
opinion. 

No reflection on Oliver in this particular of 



194 LATEK DOMESTIC LIFE. 

\ 

chastity is now reproduced by historians ; and it 
is only necessary to recall those who resorted to 
Whitehall, to know that the banqueting-room, 
so polluted in Charles's time of the " unspeakable 
mercies," was white and clean in the Protector's 
day. With the exception of Thurloe, Mr. John 
Milton was, probably, as often there as any other 
man ; often on business, often for recreation ; 
for music, of which the immortal poet and his 
companion, Oliver, were very fond. The Rev. 
John Wheelwright, his old foot-ball playmate, 
dropped in on Oliver at Whitehall, and other 
New England Puritans were visitors there. 
Thurloe, who kept a spy in every court of Eu- 
rope, even in Charles's little movable court, was 
of course a constant visitor ; and if he and Oli- 
ver, when plots were on foot, got off by them- 
selves and had a quieting pipe together, who can 
blame them? It is related that Dryden, whose 
lines we have quoted, was a guest ; but the less 
said about him now, in this connection, the better. 
The light of Whitehall was Elizabeth Claypole, 
Oliver's daughter, in whom he had garnered up 
his heart — a sweet and beautiful woman. 

It is easy to fill, in the mind's eye, this White- 
hall Palace with the great and prominent men 
of the time. Some bishops (Low Church ones) 



LATER DOMESTIC LIFE. 195 

were there, doctors of divinity, professors from 
the universities, solid learned lawyers, admirals 
— Blake among them — army officers, foreign 
ambassadors, etc. 

There was one inmate of Whitehall who calls 
for a page in this narrative — Oliver's old mother, 
who is said to have given him some of his best 
traits of character. She was now ninety-four 
years old, but her mental faculties were but little 
obscured. Every day, it is related, her kind, 
affectionate son visited her in her room. Every 
day she wished to see his face and to hear his 
voice. To her he was not the great captain of 
Dunbar, nor the invincible conqueror whom all 
the sovereigns of Europe feared ; he was her 
Oliver, her boy, her only one, the pet of the old 
Huntingdon home. He sits and talks with her, 
but not a word is said of war or parliaments ; 
the talk is of the far past. 

Memories sweet and dear are gone over again 
and again, and never seem to lose their interest : 
the kind father, long ago gone, who took his 
boy to Cambridge ; the old house, the brook run- 
ning near it ; the winter evenings when Doctor 
Beard and others came in for a little talk; Cousin 
Hampden ; yes, with tears and tender voice, good 
Uncle Oliver, godfather Oliver, and the pleasant 



196 LATER DOMESTIC LIFE. 

walks to Hinchinbrook. All the past, little of 
the present, is gone over. At last came a scene 
worth the vision of an angel. Oliver for the last 
time is by her side, and she is passing to the 
other life. She looks up and says, " My dear 
son, I leave my heart with thee ; good-night ! " and 
dies. Tenderly, through nearly forty years of 
widowhood, this mother had been watched over 
and cared for by the most dutiful of sons, and 
now he lays her body in Westminster Abbey. 
She was a noble woman. Even royalists spoke 
kindly of her. Her picture is a pleasant one to 
look at. Her memory will be kept alive, for she 
was the mother of a hero. 

But little is known of Oliver's domestic life in 
Whitehall, but much in regard to it may be in- 
ferred from his character, which shines out from 
his letters, speeches and kind actions with remark- 
able clearness. It may be doubted if there can 
be found a saint in the Roman calendar for 
whom so many positive proofs of goodness can 
be found. This will seem a strange statement 
to those who have looked upon him as a selfish, 
blood-thirsty, cruel man ; but between the time 
when he looked after poor old sick " Benson," 
and " divers poor people in ye work-house " of 
Ely, to the time when he saved Ormond from 






LATER DOMESTIC LIFE. 197 

the Tower and sent him back to Charles, the 
instances of his generous and pious acts are 
numerous and striking. We know Saint Louis, 
the best of the French saints, a man worth can- 
onizing if any are ; but of his good deeds history 
does not record so many as can be indisputably 
placed to the credit of Oliver. 

Our hero then, having been proved to be 
good outside of his house, we may infer that the 
domestic life in Whitehall, or rather what there 
could be of it, between the pranks of Anabaptists 
and the plots of royalist assassins, was a genial 
and pleasant life. We know that when Oliver 
drove out to Hampton Court, as he usually did 
on Saturdays, Elizabeth and his other children 
were sure of having a good time with their 
father. We can be sure that he had Dorothy's 
parents up from Hursley now and then, for a 
pleasant visit. We can be sure that music and 
singing were not limited to state occasions, and 
to those solid Dutch ambassadors. He was the 
possessor of a fine library, and that fact throws 
light on his private life. Amidst his pressing 
cares and duties he found some time for books. 
One can hardly think of him as a man having an 
eye for pictures ; but he is credited with having 
saved the paintings of Raphael. His own like- 



198 LATER DOMESTIC LIFE. 

ness, in the Dunbar time, he did not care to have 
taken, though an engraver had been sent four 
hundred miles, from London to Edinburgh, to 
put it on a medal. He was anxious, however, to 
have the engraver looked after and permanently 
employed ; and in his letter to the medal com- 
mittee, Mr. Symonds, who had " made so great a 
journey about a business importing so little," 
was the main subject which enlisted his generous 
thought. Half the letter is about Symonds ; the 
Dunbar medal, with his face on it, awakens but 
little interest in his earnest and large soul. It 
must have been an annoyance to him to sit to 
Lely ; one can almost hear his tone, " paint me 
as I am." The " wart " may still be seen on the 
picture which hangs in Warwick Castle. 

The Dutch dinner was not the only one given 
at Whitehall of which there is record in Thurloe. 
One day Oliver had a large company of clergy- 
men, Dr. Owen and others, to dine with him, and 
an old writer says, " He sat at table with them, 
and was cheerful and familiar in their company." 
He did not, the reader will notice, sit alone on 
this occasion, as he was compelled by his office 
to do when ambassadors took dinner with him. 

It must be remarked that this domestic life 
was going on amid the events described in an- 



LATER DOMESTIC LIFE. 199 

other chapter ; going on when Blake was blazing 
away with his guns at sea ; when the clay of 
prayer was appointed, and the collection of 
money made for the persecuted Protestants of 
Piedmont ; when desperadoes were trying to get 
his head, and the large rewards which Charles 
had offered for it ; when private fast days were 
kept by Oliver and his council ; when judges 
were summoned to the " Painted Chamber " of 
vVestminster to hear a sermon from Mr. Bridges ; 
when the slow judges of the Chancery Court, and 
the long-winded lawyers of Temple Bar, took 
quite a different view of the twenty-three thou- 
sand cases pending from that taken by Oliver, 
who desired that weary litigants should have 
their suits administered on with justice and 
purity, instead of being dragged along year after 
year for the benefit of those to whom their 
claims had been intrusted. 

One of the Dutch ambassadors states in a 
letter that the Protector secured for the Pied- 
montese one hundred thousand pounds; an over- 
estimate, probably, but the amount was large ; 
equal certainly to any modern charity collection ; 
perhaps what a million dollars would be worth 
in our day. This was a part of Oliver's domes- 
tic life, an episode of the warrior's and stateman's 



200 LATER DOMESTIC LIFE. 

life. " Good-natured," writes Whitelocke. Yes ; 
and more than that : pity for the distressed, help 
for those needing help, were with him unfailing-. 
He had just the qualities which fit one to manage 
a modern humane society. 

Another little flash of light is thrown on the 
domestic life by a letter dated June 17, 1657. 
Oliver writes to Fleetwood, his son-in-law, deputy 
in Ireland. u My dear Charles, my dear love to 
thee." Love to " my dear Biddy, who is a joy to 
my heart, ... if the good of the public " will 
allow, "come over with your dear wife." He 
wants to see Biddy and Charles at Whitehall, 
but they must not come at the sacrifice of the 
good of the public. To one who will think a 
moment, that sportive nickname, " Biddy," will 
throw not a flash only, but a flood of light on 
Oliver. He is tired of ambassadors and Parlia- 
ment men ; he wants to have Biddy and Charles 
by his side. One of the Arnolds, if the writer 
remembers, has written something about our 
needing "light and sweetness." Now if ever a 
man and a father had those qualities, that stout 
Englishman, Oliver Cromwell, had them. Light 
and sweetness encircled his mother, his wife, all 
his children, and shone through his life to bless 
and comfort others. 



LATER DOMESTIC LIFE. 201 

A month after this letter was written, the 
" Banqueting-room " was "hung with arras," 
the galleries were " full of ladies," the Life 
Guards in their " gray frock coats with velvet 
welts," were mating as good a show as possible ; 
and the poor and to be pitied Lord Protector is 
seen standing on "a carpet with a chair of state 
behind him." A " brilliant Swedish gentleman 
ambassador, with numerous gilt coaches and in- 
numerable outriders," has arrived in London, and 
it is necessary to give him audience. The am- 
bassador saluted thrice as he advanced ; " thrice 
lifting his noble hat and feathers as the Protec- 
tor lifted his." Then followed the speeches. 
Oliver's was brief, but to the point. " My Lords, 
you are welcome into England. ... I am 
very willing to enter into a nearer and more 
strict alliance and friendship with the king of 
Swedeland. ... I shall nominate some per- 
sons to meet and treat with your lordships." 
This speech would be a good one for some of our 
modern diplomatists to imitate. 

In that same year, a " learned Portuguese 
Jew," of Amsterdam, made his appearance at 
Whitehall, and to him Oliver gave a warm and 
hearty welcome. Four hundred years before the 
Jews had been banished from England, and 



202 LATER DOMESTIC LIFE. 

Oliver thought it was time to allow them to 
come back. So after a little private talk, and 
probably some hospitality, he got together his 
chief advisers to meet Manasseh Ben Israel, 
give him a hearing and see what could be done. 
One who was at the gathering relates that the 
Protector never spoke so well as when pleading 
for the banished Jews. He would open the arms 
of England and receive them back again. But, 
alas ! the chief justices, most of the clergy and 
the " Scripture prophecies " were against the 
Protector, and the edict of banishment remained 
unchanged. Those musty folios, worth a penny 
a pound in the year 1831, tell us that some, 
and even some of the clergy, were with Oliver ; 
but the majority carried the day against the 
Jews. It is pleasant, however, to know that 
Oliver, in his capacity as constable, managed to 
slip Jews into London, and to allow them a 
synagogue. Our old friends, the royalists, pene- 
trate his motive. He wished to borrow money 
of the Jews. Oliver could get money enough at 
Amsterdam, or on the London Exchange, or, at 
a pinch, he could pull out a few royalist teeth ; 
money was the least of Oliver's wants. 

On the evening of the day when this con- 
ference touching the Jews was held, Oliver's 



LATER DOMESTIC LIFE. 203 

domestic life was interrupted by the appearance 
of Ludlow at Whitehall. He came from Ire- 
land. Ludlow had no love for Oliver after the 
Protectorate began. He now comes to White- 
hall to say that he will be peaceable " so long' 
as he sees no chance otherwise ; " that he will 
not try to upset the Government, unless a good 
opportunity occurs. The Protector permits him 
to reside in Essex, keeping his eye upon him. 

And then came those wearisome weeks when 
Parliament disturbed the domestic life of White- 
hall in the matter of kingship. No wonder that 
Oliver, distracted by the lawyers and forced to 
make antagonistic speeches, wished himself back 
to his old woodside and his sheep. Kingship set- 
tled in the negative, the next disturbance is the 
inauguration as Protector — the robe of purple 
velvet, the scepter of gold, the chair of state and 
more speech-making. One would like to know 
how the Constable felt, and what he said to his 
wife and children when he got back at evening 
from Westminster, and from this semi-royal 
symbolism. 

The day was Friday, June 26, 1657, and after 
the ceremonies in the " Painted Chamber " the 
Government went on as before. We soon find 
Oliver writing to Lockhart to get Dunkirk ; to 



204 LATER DOMESTIC LIFE. 

" divert the Spaniards from assisting Charles ; " 
to " take boldness and freedom " in dealing with 
the French. Work, work is the business of 
Oliver. Shows, even his own inauguration, were 
not of much use to him. This was his second 
inauguration. 

And now there is momentary brightness in 
the domestic life. In November, 1657, both the 
younger daughters were married. " The poor, 
little Fanny," so troubled about her engagement, 
is now, according to old newspapers, the "most 
illustrious Lady Frances," and she marries into 
the family of the Earl of Warwick. The earl 
himself, the Countess Dowager of Devonshire, 
and "many other persons of high honor and 
quality " went to the wedding. In the following 
week at Hampton Court, the " musical, glib- 
tongued" Mary was married. Beautiful, bright- 
est days, to be soon followed by blackest nights ; 
sunlit islands ere long to be submerged forever. 

Between the time of these weddings and Sep- 
tember 3, 1658, Oliver is watching the frantic 
and turbulent Anabaptists, the Duke of Ormond 
and royalist plotters. Four years have now gone 
since the Protector escaped the danger of the 
drive to Hampton Court, and again the "hydra" 
lifts its head, but lifts it only to be cut off, and 



LATER DOMESTIC LIFE. 205 

cut off for the last time, A night is appointed 
by the royalists, the night of May 15, 1G58, to 
fire the houses at the Tower, and to overthrow 
the Government. But Thurloe's eyes are sleep- 
less, and Cromwell's arm is still strong. The 
governor of the Tower, instead of putting out 
the fire of burning buildings, marches with artil- 
lery into the city ; the noise which he makes, as 
his guns pass through the streets, is enough to 
drive the royalists to hiding-places. A few days 
later a court of justice, made up of all the judges 
and chief law officials, " a hundred and thirty 
heads," sat; and the Kev. Dr. Hewit and Sir 
Henry Slingsby are condemned to die ; to others 
mercy is granted. Rushworth and other old 
writers deeply lament the death of these two 
men. " In those same June days," writes Car- 
lyle, " while Hewit and Slingsby lay down their 
heads on Tower Hill, and the English hydra 
finds its master is still here, there arrives the news 
. . . of Dunkirk gloriously taken, Spaniards 
gloriously beaten ; victories and successes abroad 
which are a new illumination to the Lord Pro- 
tector in the eyes of England. Splendid nephews 
of the Cardinal, Manginis, Dukes de Crequi, 
come across the Channel to ' congratulate the most 
invincible of sovereigns ; ' young Louis XIV. 



206 LATER DOMESTIC LIFE. 

himself would have come, had not the attack 
of smallpox prevented." " Once more Oliver 
has saved Puritan England, and he looks with 
confidence toward summoning another Parlia- 
ment of juster disposition toward Puritan Eng- 
land and him." " Not till Oliver Cromwell's 
head lie low shall English Puritanism bend 
its head to any created thing. Erect, with 
its foot on the neck of hydra Babylon, with its 
open Bible and drawn sword shall Puritanism 
stand, and with pious all-defiance victoriously 
front the world. That was Oliver Cromwell's 
appointed function in this piece of sublunary 
space, in this section of swift-flowing time, that 
noble, perilous, painful function ; and he has 
manfully done it, and is now near ending it, and 
getting honorably relieved from it." 

In the summer of 1658, a sorrow, falling close 
on other sorrows, the deaths of Rich and of the 
Earl of Warwick, fell with crushing power on 
the heart of our great hero. His eldest daughter, 
Elizabeth, Mrs. Clay pole, fell sick at Hampton 
Court, and there she died. In Thurloe we read 
that for fourteen days Oliver was at her bedside, 
unable to attend to any public business ; and 
Maidstone tells us, that " the sympathy of his 
spirit with his dying daughter did break him 




< HJVKR CROMWELL. 



cast from the original mask taken after death, voir owned by Thomas Woolner, sculptor, 
jt was given by him to Thomas Garlyle, who gave it in 1873 to Charles Eliot 
Norton, from whom Harvard College received it in 1881.) 



LATER DOMESTIC LIFE. 207 

down." Strong and unmoved in the storms of 
the world, this father, clinging tenderly to his 
child until she died, was now prostrated ; but 
with a broken heart and impaired health, he 
attempted to resume his duties. It was im- 
possible. He was directed by his doctors to 
leave Hampton Court and go to London ; but 
the change brought no benefit, and he died on 
September 3, 1658. " His time was come," wrote 
his friend Maidstone, " and neither prayers nor 
tears could prevail with God to lengthen out his 
life, and continue him longer with us." We will 
not linger over the closing scene. We let the cur- 
tain fall around his death-bed with the full belief 
that a whiter and purer spirit has seldom passed 
away from earth. 

No place in England suggests so many buried 
enmities as Westminster Abbey. Side by side 
lie there entombed those who in life were deadly 
foes. We may pass within those walls, over the 
graves and amid the monuments of warriors, 
statesmen and rulers who hated each other while 
living, but who now rest together there in peace. 
The time, we believe, will come when the name 
of Oliver Cromwell will be inscribed in that 
Temple with the names of England's most 
illustrious men. 



CHAPTER IX. 

CROMWELL LETTERS. 

Of the two hundred and thirty-three Cromwell 
letters which Carlyle has published, there is but 
one which is dated before the year 1635. This 
brief note is all that remains of what Oliver 
Cromwell wrote during- the first thirty-six years 
of his life. It is addressed — 

To my approved good friend, Mr. Henry Down- 
hall, at his chambers in St. Johns College, 
Cambridge : These. 

Huntingdon, 14th October, 1626. 
Loving Sir: 

Make me so much your servant as to be god- 
father unto my child. I would myself have come 
over to have made a formal invitation, but my 
occasions would not permit me ; and therefore 
208 



CROMWELL LETTERS. 209 

hold me in that excused. The day of your 
trouble is Xhursday next. Let me entreat your 
company on Wednesday. By this time it ap- 
pears I am more apt to encroach upon you for 
new favors than to show you my thankfulness 
for the ]ove I have already found. But I know 
your patience and your goodness cannot be 
exhausted by 

Your friend and servant, 

Oliver Cromwell. 

Of this letter, the first in his Appendix, Car- 
lyle says : " It is of the last degree of insignifi- 
cance, a mere note of invitation to Downhall to 
stand 'godfather unto my child; ' man-child, now 
ten days old, who, as we may see, is christened 
on Thursday next by the name of Richard." For 
once in his life Carlyle is wrong. The letter, or 
note, is not insignificant. On the contrary, it is 
far more worth commenting on than scores of the 
letters to which much space is given. Carlyle 
was not in good humor when he wrote his Ap- 
pendix. After his work was, as he thought, fin- 
ished, with its hundred and fifty-five letters, he 
made a Supplement, with its fifty-three letters, 
and made it reluctantly. He would not re-cast 
his book to admit new letters. " To unhoop your 



210 CROMWELL LETTERS. 

cask again," he says, " and try to insert new 
staves when the old ones, better qr worse, do 
already hang together, no cooper will recom- 
mend." But after the Supplement came still 
other letters, and an Appendix seemed necessary. 
This was too much for Carlyle's patience, and so 
we have the sarcastic comments : " Mere note to 
Downhall," " Man-child now ten days old . . . 
christened Richard." 

The mere name of " Richard " was enough to 
put the great elucidator off his balance. Now 
the only letter known to be in existence written 
within the first thirty-six years of the life of so 
remarkable a man as Oliver Cromwell, even had 
it no intrinsic value, should have had better 
recognition. But the letter is one worth notic- 
ing. Few adepts at composition, in our age of 
culture, could write so graceful a note, or put so 
much in so small a compass. It throws much 
light on Oliver, the young farmer. The letter 
shows that Oliver is a very busy man. He has 
not time to travel the fifteen miles to Cambridge, 
and give a formal invitation. It shows that he 
is still in connection with the Episcopal Church. 
It shows that he has the spirit of hospitality ; he 
urges Downhall to come the day before the bap- 
tism, evidently wants to have a good time with 



CROMWELL LETTERS. 211 

his friend. Favors received from Downhall are 
acknowledged in the most delicate way. The 
brevity of the letter is characteristic of the man 
who wrote it. Seldom is so much civility, good 
breeding and courtesy indicated within so small 
a space. 

Curiously enough, Carlyle exhausts himself in 
his usual way of all that he knows about Down- 
hall. Tells how Downhall came of gentlefolks, 
was made a Fellow of St. John's, Cambridge, 
on the twelfth of April, 1614, had known Oliver 
two years after that, and had probably been 
helpful to him ; how, in later years, he became 
an Anti-Puritan Malignant ; how, surviving the 
restoration, he became Archdeacon of Hunting- 
don in 1667, fifty-one years after he had lodged 
there as Oliver Cromwell's guest and gossip. 
All this is told, but Oliver's letter, the only ex- 
tant letter written before he was thirty-six years 
old, preserved for more than two hundred years, 
" is of the last degree of insignificance." Richard 
and the " ugly labor " of the Appendix evidently 
disturbed Carlyle, and he failed to see the value 
of the letter. 

The next extant letter from Oliver's pen was 
written nine years later, in 1635, and that was a 
letter written for charity, in the interest of one 



212 CEOMWELL LETTERS. 

Dr. Wells, who seemed likely not to get paid for 
his preaching. 

The third letter is given in full. 

To Mr. Hand at Ely : These. 

Ely, IZth September, 1638. 
Mr. Hand: 

I doubt not but I shall be as good as my word 
for your money. I desire you to deliver forty 
shillings of the town money to this bearer, to pay 
for the physic for Benson's cure. If the gentle- 
men will not allow it at the time of account, 
keep this note, and I will pay you out of my own 
purse. So I rest 

Your loving friend, 

Oliver Cromwell. 

This letter also is in the Appendix. Carlyle 
comments : " Poor Benson is an old invalid. 
Mr. Hand's disbursements for him in 183G, were 
£2. 7. 4. . . . To Benson at divers times, 
£0. 15. 0." " Let him have forty shillings more, 
and if the gentlemen won't allow it, Oliver Crom- 
well will pay it out of his own purse." 

These three letters were, with one exception, 
all that were discoverable fifty years ago by Car- 
lyle of a date prior to 1639. Two of the letters 



CROMWELL LETTERS. 213 

relate to charities ; to interests that were unself- 
ish, and the same kind feeling for others which 
is indicated in them is a noticeable peculiarity 
of Oliver's late life. His generosity no one who 
looks into his character, can for a moment doubt. 

The fourth letter suggests the charge often 
made and even now repeated, that in regard to 
religion Cromwell was a hypocrite. The date is 
October 13, 1638, and the letter is addressed to 
his cousin, Mrs. St. John, the wife of the great 
barrister. Within the space of this book, it is 
impossible to give many quotations, or to make 
extended comments on the letters. Readers 
must go to the letters and Carlyle's remarks on 
them, in order to have a real appreciation of the 
man who " once walked with God," and whose 
life was " girdled with Eternities and Godhoods." 
It must suffice to say that this fourth letter of 
Oliver's came from a soul full of gratitude to the 
Almighty, and that nearly all the subsequent 
letters of a domestic kind, and not a few of the 
letters relating to the war, up to near the end of 
his life, are written in precisely the same spirit. 

Fourteen and fifteen years later he writes, in 
Whitehall Palace, at a time when England is " in 
huge travail throes," to his son-in-law, Fleetwood, 
commander-in-chief of the forces in Ireland, long 



214 CROMWELL LETTERS. 

letters which have in them almost nothing but 
piety, reverence of the Supreme, and love of 
Christ. From Edinburgh, in 1651, he writes to 
his wife, " the great good thy soul can wish is, 
that the Lord lift upon thee the light of his 
countenance, which is better than life." In an- 
other letter he expressed the wish " to get a heart 
to love and serve his Heavenly Father better." 
" Pray for me," he says, " truly I do daily for 
thee." No hypocrite, thirty years married, 
would write in this way to his wife ; and what 
possible advantage could come to a man by writ- 
ing private family letters, through a long course 
of years, about God and the soul, if he did not 
believe in these entities ? The charge of hypoc- 
risy is as false as all the other defamatory charges. 
But it may be said that Cromwell's letters to his 
wife prove nothing as to his religious character; 
that a man may write piously to his wife, while 
she knows better than any one else that he is 
playing a part ; but it happens, in this case, that 
we know what Elizabeth Cromwell thought of her 
husband after she had lived with him for thirty 
years. It happens that one letter which she 
w r rote to Oliver has been kept through the cent- 
uries ; only one, dated December 27, 1650. It 
begins " My dearest," and this passage, which 



CROMWELL LETTERS. 215 

ought to settle forever this hypocrisy slander, is 
in it. " I should rejoice to hear your desire in 
seeing me, but I desire to submit to the Provi- 
dence of God ; hoping the Lord, who hath sepa- 
rated us, and hath often brought us together 
again, will in his good time bring us again to the 
praise of his name. Truly, my life is but half 
a life in your absence, did not the Lord make it 
up in himself, which I must acknowledge to the 
praise of his grace." 

About three months before the writing of this 
letter, Oliver, on the day after the battle of Dun- 
bar, wrote to Elizabeth, and he too begins with 
" My Dearest." This letter is a short one, and 
is given in full. 

For my beloved wife, Elizabeth Cromwell, at 

the Cockpit : These. 

Dunbar, 4th September, 1650. 
My Dearest : 

I have not leisure to write much. But I 
could chide thee, that in many of thy letters 
thou writest to me, that I should not be unmind- 
ful of thee and thy little ones. Truly, if I love 
you not too well, I think I err not on the other 
hand much. Thou art dearer to me than any 
creature ; let that suffice. The Lord hath shown 



216 CROMWELL LETTERS. 

us an exceeding mercy ; who can tell how great 
it is. My weak faith hath been upheld. I have 
"been, in my inward man, marvelously supported, 
though I assure thee I grow an old man and 
feel the infirmities of age stealing upon me. 
Would my corruption did as fast decrease. Pray 
on my behalf in the latter respect. The particu- 
lars of our late success Harry Vane or Gilbert 
Pickering will impart to thee. My love to all 
dear friends. I rest thine, 

Oliver Cromwell. 

Tins letter indicates that Elizabeth wrote 
many letters, and that she was rather disturbed 
that her husband did not write her oftener. " I 
have not leisure," he tells her, " to write much." 
He chides her for intimating that he has been 
unmindful of her and the little ones ; " thou art 
dearer to me than any creature." He has some 
difficult work to do in Scotland, which his wife 
probably did not fully appreciate. 

Four or five letters only, which passed between 
this loving couple during the nearly forty years 
of their married life, are all that remain ; the 
rest are gone. These letters are sweet and 
beautiful. 

When it is stated that there are of the Crom- 



CROMWELL LETTERS. 217 

well letters one hundred and four relating to war, 
twenty and more relating to kind friendly pur- 
poses or acts outside of his family, that two of 
his letters to Richard can be read, and that nine- 
teen of the letters, which the patient, anxious 
father wrote about, or in the interests of, this son, 
have survived ; that there are nineteen letters 
addressed to the Scots, and no small number 
of miscellaneous letters, it is evident that a book 
rather than a chapter is needed in order to do 
justice to them. Of the war letters nothing shall 
be said excepting that many writers, including 
the royalist, Sir Walter Scott, have acquitted 
Cromwell of bloodthirstiness. Cromwell fought 
as Grant and Sherman and Lee fought — to 
effect an object ; not for love of war. 

The letters written with a view to conferring 
favors or giving comfort, must be disposed of 
briefly. One is addressed to Thomas Knyvett, 
asking him to look after his " honest, poor neigh- 
bors," who are in some trouble and are likely to 
be put to more by Robert Brown, one of Kny- 
vett's tenants ; one to Colonel Walton asking 
him to forget his private sorrow in remembering 
that his son, who had fallen in battle, is " a saint 
in Heaven ; " one is an appeal to Lord Fairfax 
for a poor widow, whose husband on his death- 



218 CROMWELL LETTERS. 

bed had asked that " I should befriend his wife 
and children to the Parliament or to your Ex- 
cellency ; " one is to the keeper of the library 
at St. James, telling him to let Sir Oliver Flem- 
ming have " two or three such books as he shall 
choose ; " one to his worthy friend Dr. Love, of 
Cambridge, asking him that he will look out for 
the interests of Mrs. Nutting in connection with 
a lease ; one is to the Hon. William Lenthall, 
asking of the Parliament " justice and charity " 
for a person whose estate has decayed by the 
war; one is to Colonel Hacker, praying that 
Captain Empson may be " lovingly received," 
and that Captain Hubert, who is to be disap- 
pointed in the matter of an appointment in the 
army service, may be told that " I shall not be 
unmindful of him," and that "no disrespect is 
intended for him " (a graceful, kind thing for 
Hubert) ; one is to secure an office in a custom 
house, " in the customs," for a young man who 
is " an object of pity," and has " poor parents ; " 
another is in the interest of Mr. Draper, a 
clergyman who wants to get a parish ; one is to 
the Lord Mayor of London in behalf of the Rev. 
Mr. Turner, who the Protector thinks is a fit 
person to hold the vicarage of Christ Church. 
Newgate Street ; and one is to Dr. Greenwood, 



CROMWELL LETTERS. 21S 

Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, 
requesting that Mr. Waterhouse may have the 
degree of Doctor of Medicine conferred on him. 

Rather a dull page this, does the reader say ; 
not one of these names is known to him ; he 
cares nothing about these persons ? Well, they 
were living two hundred and fifty years ago : had 
flesh and bones and feelings, then : were in 
trouble, had leases to make, had sorrows, felt 
poverty's keen touch, had lost property in the 
wars, wanted to get books out of a library and 
could not get them without an order, desired pro- 
motion in the army, wished to get a place in the 
custom house, had families to support, had plenty 
of sermons but no call to a parish, hoped for a 
title from a college, just as men do now ; and 
Oliver Cromwell helped them — helped them all ; 
got them out of their difficulties, secured them 
places and support, befriended them. 

These were a few of the thousands of little 
things that occupied Oliver's attention and drew 
out his sympathy ; but they give an idea of the 
quality of the man. He was willing to put him- 
self to the trouble of aiding those who needed 
help ; not a universal gift even in these modern 
enlightened times in which we live. 

It is remarkable that in all these Cromwell 



220 CROMWELL LETTERS. 

letters, so many of which were private letters, 
and which, doubtless, were like thousands which 

he wrote, there is not to be found a line indicat- 
ing- self-exaltation ; not a word to show that he 
thought himself to be a man superior to his 
fellows. In this particular his correspondence is 
a strange revelation, and the fact is the more 
noticeable when we remember that he was only 
an obscure farmer until he was more than forty 
years old. Conscious of his superiority he must 
have been, but he never reveals his knowledge 
of it. 

To illustrate further Oliver's character, an- 
other letter must be given. A story was started 
that he had concealed himself in his house in 
order to avoid the visits of a gentleman who had 
called on him. On hearing this he wrote the 
following letter ; 

To my honored friend, Anthony Huncjerford, 

Esquire : T/iese. 

Cockpit, 10th December, 1652. 
Sir: 

I understand by my cousin Dunch of so much 
trouble of yours, and so much unhandsomeness 
(at least seeming so) on my part, as doth not a 
little afflict me, until I give you this account of 



CROMWELL LETTERS. 221 

my innocence. She was pleased to tell my wife 
of your often resorts to my house to visit me, 
and of your disappointments. Truly, Sir, had 
I but once known of your being there, and " had 
concealed myself," it had been an action so be- 
low a gentleman or an honest man, so full of 
ingratitude for your civilities I have received 
from you, as would have rendered me unworthy 
of human society. Believe ine, Sir, I am much 
ashamed that the least color of the appearance of 
such a thing should have happened, and I could 
not take satisfaction but by this plain dealing 
for my justification, which I ingenuously offer 
you. And although Providence did not dispose 
other matters to our satisfaction [referring per- 
haps to an offer of marriage for Richard] yet 
your nobleness in that overture obligeth me, and 
I hope ever shall while I live, to study upon all 
occasions to approve myself your Family's and 
your 

Most affectionate and humble servant, 

Oliver Cromwell. 
My wife and I desire our service be presented 
to your Lady and Family. 

This letter was preserved in the old chest of 
Farley Castle, the mansion of the Hungerfords, 



222 CROMWELL LETTERS. 

and it surely was worth keeping. It is a most 
graceful apology for a seeming offense. 

The letters which Oliver wrote to Mr. Mayor 
and others, in connection with Richard's marriage 
to Dorothy Mayor, are given with their dates, and 
a strange contrast they make with the war docu- 
ments, with which, in Carlyle's Cromwell, they 
are mingled. What Carlyle thought of Richard 
is here more clearly indicated than in his remarks 
on the invitation to the baptism. 

Oliver writes at London, April 6, 1649 ( busy 
at that time preparing for Ireland), to Mr. 
Mayor : " My son had a great desire to come 
down and wait upon your daughter. I perceive 
he minds that more than to attend to business 
here." Carlyle puts a star at the end of this 
sentence, and at the bottom of the page the star 
directs the reader to his brief summing up of his 
opinion as to Richard ; simply this : "The dog." 
Still Carlyle gives all the Richard letters which 
he can lay his hands on ; and these letters, though 
mainly relating to the business parts of the mar- 
riage arrangements, bring out in striking ways 
Cromwell's noble character. 

A part of a letter sent to Mr. Mayor some 
time after the marriage is worth quoting. We 
ask the reader of it who believes that Cromwell 



CROMWELL LETTERS. 223 

was a canting hypocrite to reflect on it, and to ask 
himself what possible motive the writer could have 
had for enlightening Mr. Mayor as to his thoughts 
and feelings. The letter was written for Mayor, 
and for him alone, and Mayor was only a country 
gentleman who could be of no use to Oliver, ex- 
cept in friendship. This letter is in itself a com- 
plete refutation of the charge of hypocrisy which 
stands now against Cromwell in hundreds of his- 
tories, in scores of poems, in not a few novels, 
and which has been repeated in nearly all English 
school history books for two hundred years. 

The letter is dated July 17, 1650, and was 
written when Cromwell was on his way to Scot- 
land and to Dunbar battle. " You are all often 
in my poor prayers. . . . Oh ! how good it 
is to close with Christ betimes ; there is nothing 
else worth looking after. I beseech you, call 
upon him. I hope you will discharge my duty 
and your own love. You see how I am employed. 
I need pity. I know what I feel. Great place 
and business in the world is not worth the look- 
ing after. I should have no comfort in mine, 
but that my hope is in the Lord's presence. I 
have not sought these things ; truly I have been 
called unto them by the Lord, and therefore am 
not without some assurance that he will enable 



224 CROMWELL LETTERS. 

Ms poor worm and weak servant to do his will, 
and to fulfill my generation. In this I desire 
your prayers. 

Your very affectionate brother, 

Oliver Cromwell. 

Has the reader noticed Cromwell's way of 
greeting his friends in his letters ? noticed his 
"loving sir" to Downhall, his "affectionate 
brother" to Mayor, and your "loving friend" in 
the note to Mr. Hand about poor, sick Benson ? 
The thing is worth noting, if one cares to meas- 
ure the heart of the man. The addresses and 
the warm signatures of his letters alone are 
enough to make one, who prefers goodness and 
sweetness to greatness, cling to Oliver and love 
him. 

Again and again, in his speeches before Par- 
liament, Oliver asserted that he had not sought 
the place he was in, and here we have in the 
foregoing letter the same assertion, written just 
after he had been made gencral-in-chief ; a letter 
which John Dunch, who married Dorothy Mayor's 
sister Anne, found, with sixteen other letters, 
when he was " groping about Hursley," Richard 
Mayor's home. These seventeen letters Dunch 
laid up in Pusey, in Berkshire, his home. After 



CROMWELL LETTERS. 225 

" a century or so, Horace Walpole, a collector of 
letters, got his eye on them," and " here they 
still are and continue," thanks to John Dunch 
and Horace Walpole and Thomas Carlyle. 

There are in the collection of letters no Cam- 
bridge letters to Oliver's father, no letters to his 
mother, none to his sisters, or to his daughters, 
excepting one to Bridget Ireton, and there are 
but two addressed to his son Henry. Henry be- 
came Lord Deputy in Ireland, and he held that 
place till the end of the Protectorate. Had he, 
instead of his brother Richard, succeeded his 
father, Macaulay's dream of a permanent House 
of Cromwell might have been a reality. 

The two letters to Henry contain advice touch- 
ing the administration of the Government in Ire- 
land. In one of them he writes : " I do belie ve 
there may be some particular persons who are 
not very well pleased with the present condition 
of things, and may be apt to show their discon- 
tent as they have opportunity ; but this should 
not make too great impressions in you. Time 
and patience may work them to a better frame 
of spirit, and bring them to see that which for 
the present seems hid from them, especially if 
they shall see your moderation and love toward 
them if they are found in other ways toward you, 



226 CROMWELL LETTERS. 

which I earnestly desire you to study and en- 
deavor all that lies in you. Whereof both you 
and I shall have the comfort, whatsoever the issue 
and event shall be. 

Your affectionate father, 

Oliver P. 

Not long after the day of Dunbar a medalist 
was sent by the " Honorable, the Committee of 
the Army," at London, to Edinburgh to take a 
copy of Oliver's face for a medal commemorative 
of the battle. This attention calls out a charac- 
teristic letter. 

Gentlemen : 

It was not a little wonder to me that you 
should send Mr. Symonds so great a journey 
about a business importing so little, so far as it 
relates to me. 

He then suggests that the medal be engraved 
with the Parliament on one side and the army 
on the other, with this inscription over the head 
of it: 

" ' The Lord of Hosts,' which was our word 
that day. Wherefore, if I may beg it as a 
favor from you, I most earnestly beseech you, 
if I may do it without offense, that it may be 



CROMWELL LETTERS. 227 

so. And if you think not fit to have it as I 
offer, you may alter it as you see cause ; only I 
do think I may truly say it will be very thankfully 
acknowledged by me if you will spare the having 
my effigies in it." And he ends his letter by 
kindly saying that the "pains and trouble of Mr. 
Symonds in making the long journey have been 
very great;" that Mr. Symonds is "ingenious 
and worthy of encouragement," and asking that 
they will please confer upon him " that employ- 
ment which Nicolas Briot had before him." 
Cromwell's face on a medal does not appear to 
interest him in the slightest degree; but he 
wishes the poor medalist to secure some steady 
remunerative business. A remarkable letter this 
for a great general to write, but it is in harmony 
with his entire public and private life, so far as 
that life is revealed by his other letters, and by 
the charities in which he is known to have had 
a part. 

There are two noteworthy letters to Cardinal 
Mazarin, the minister of Louis XIV. The first 
is dated June 9, 1653. 

Sir: 

I have been surprised that Your Eminency was 
pleased to remember a person so inconsiderable 



228 CROMWELL LETTERS. 

as myself, living, as it were, withdrawn from the 
rest of the world. 

Sir, Your Eminency's 

Most humble servant, 

Oliver Cromwell. 

Some six weeks before Cromwell had broken 
up the Long Parliament, and three days before he 
issued his summons (" that the peace, safety and 
good government of the Commonwealth should 
be provided for ") to the one hundred and forty 
Puritan notables " to whom the great charge and 
trust of so weighty affairs is to be committed." 

In the speech which he made to the notables 
who formed what has been called the "Little 
Parliament," he says that he had done what "we 
have done . . . not to grasp at the power 
ourselves, or keep it in military hands, no, not 
for a day ; but as far as God enabled us with 
strength and ability, to put it into the hands of 
proper persons that might be called from the 
several parts of the nation." At the end of the 
speech he tells the members that his council of 
officers have " no authority or continuance of sit- 
ting except simply until you take further orders." 
These transactions and these assertions throw 
light on the letter to Cardinal Mazarin. 



CROMWELL LETTERS. 229 

The Lord General, as Carlyle says, " struggles 
to look upon himself as a man that has done with 
political affairs." He is a person " inconsider- 
able, living as it were withdrawn from the rest 
of the world"- — from European politics, as well 
as from public service in England. Often, in 
his later speeches, does the Protector refer to this 
period of his life, when he hoped to be able to 
retire from emplo} T ments under the Government. 

The second letter to the cardinal is dated 
December 26, 1656. Cromwell is now Protector. 
He has widened his views somewhat. He is not 
the man which the Spanish Armada, the Thirty 
Years' War, the misgovernment of James I. and 
Charles I. had made him when he came up to 
the Parliament of 1640. He will take under his 
protection Jews, Anabaptists, Episcopalians and 
even Romanists, provided they do not interfere 
with his police work of keeping Prince Charles 
out of England. He now writes to Cardinal 
Mazarin that under his government the Catholics 
have less reason for complaint than they had 
under the Parliament. He has " plucked many 
out of the fire; " and it is his purpose to make a 
" further progress " as to toleration. 

There are five letters written by Cromwell, 
and perhaps more, which crossed the Atlantic 



230 CROMWELL LETTERS. 

and have been preserved : one to Rev. John Cot- 
ton ; one to " our trusty and well beloved, the 
president, assistants and inhabitants of Rhode 
Island, together with the rest of the Providence 
plantations in the Narragansett Bay in New 
England ; " one to Captain John Leverett, com- 
mander of the forts lately taken from the French 
in America ; one to the Commissioners of Mary- 
land ; one to Richard Bennet, Esquire, Governor 
of Virginia. To the Rev. John Cotton, pastor of 
the church at Boston, he writes: "Truly I am 
ready to serve you and the rest of your brethren 
and churches with you." 

The letter to Rhode Island is an answer to the 
request of its agent, asking that some particulars 
about the government may be settled. The Pro- 
tector answers politely that he will attend to the 
matter when he has time ; in the meanwhile 
" you are to proceed in your government accord- 
ing to the tenor of your charter." To Captain 
Leverett he writes : " to defend and keep the 
French forts, which Major Sedgwick has laid 
hold of" in the region now called Nova Scotia, 
then called Arcadie ; of which forts and of the 
region which they commanded it is Oliver's pur- 
pose, for the benefit of his New Englanders, 
to retain possession. To the Commissioners of 



CROMWELL LETTERS. 231 

Maryland he writes in the way of apology. 
Previous letters, he says, were " not intended to 
stop the proceeding's of these commissioners, who 
were authorized to settle the civil government of 
Maryland." That was " not at all intended by 
us. Our intention was only to prevent 

and forbid any force or violence to be offered 
by either of the plantations of Virginia or Mary- 
land from one to the other upon the differences 
concerning their bounds, the said differences be- 
ing then under the consideration of ourself and 
council here." To the Governor of Virginia 
he writes requiring him to forbear disturbing- 
Lord Baltimore, or his officers or people in 
Maryland, and to "permit all things to remain as 
they were before any disturbance or alterations 
made by you or by any other, upon pretense of 
authority from you, till the said differences be 
determined by us here, and we give further order 
therein." Cromwell wrote also to the colonies of 
Connecticut, but those letters are lost. The pur- 
port of some of them may, however, be inferred 
from other letters which have been preserved. 

It was known in Connecticut that Oliver had 
the purpose to remove such colonists as were dis- 
satisfied in New England to a better place and 
climate. A letter, yet unpublished, was written 



232 CROMWELL LETTERS. 

in 1654, by the Rev. Mr. Higginson of Guilford, 
Conn., to the Rev. Mr. Thacher of Weymouth, 
Mass., relating to a removal. The letter gives a 
dark and gloomy picture of the prospects in New 
England. Although no letter written by Crom- 
well is now to be found in the Connecticut ar- 
chives, there has been published by Carlyle a letter 
which indicates the Protector's wishes in this 
matter of a removal. The letter is dated Octo- 
ber, 1655, and is addressed to Daniel Searle, 
Governor of Barbadoes. The Protector instructs 
the governor to remove the people of Barbadoes 
to Jamaica " where we have twenty men-of-war," 
and where " we hope the Plantation will not be 
wanting in anything. . . . We have also 
sent to the colonies of New England like offers 
with yours, to remove thither, our resolution be- 
ing to people and plant that island." The scheme, 
so far as it related to the New England colonists, 
happily, did not mature. That beautiful island, 
about as large as the State of Connecticut, would 
have furnished rather narrow quarters even for 
the few settlers of the colonies, and it hardly 
would have sufficed for the descendants of the 
Puritans. Better, too, was New England, with 
its granite and its climate, than Jamaica with its 
alluvial soil, and its warm breezes. 



CROMWELL LETTERS. 233 

These five or six letters bring Cromwell be- 
fore us under new aspects. They indicate that 
he had the industry for which Lord Clarendon 
gives him credit ; that he did not, like most of 
the English rulers from James I. to George III., 
have the inclination to disturb the colonists, and 
that he tcok a real interest in their welfare. 

In his "Prince Rupert and the Cavaliers," 
Eliot Warburton, in allusion to the discovery of 
the letters of Charles I. at Naseby, says, if the 
letters of the " dark and crafty " Cromwell could 
be seen, How would he stand in comparison ? 
Now, it happened that Carlyle, at the time when 
Warburton was writing his book, was gathering 
all that he could find of the letters of Cromwell. 
He gathered more than two hundred letters, 
covering a period of about thirty years ; and in 
not one of these letters can a line be found in 
support of \V r arburton's contemptible insinua- 
tions. On the contrary, the letters show, for 
kindnesses done, for charities, for scrupulous 
thought in business matters, for devotion to dis- 
tasteful but necessary work, a record which it 
would be difficult, if not impossible, to equal by 
the disclosure of an equal number of letters 
written by the statesmen, or rulers, or philan- 
thropists now living in the Christian States of 



234 CROMWELL LETTERS. 

America. So far from showing, as Warburton 
believed they would show, that Oliver was "dark 
and crafty," they prove beyond a doubt that in 
all the relations of life he was guided by truth, 
virtue, generosity and the noblest piety. No 
man outside of a royalist insane asylum can read 
those two hundred and thirty-three letters and 
not find in them all that belongs to a high and 
pure character. They reveal simplicity, modesty, 
complete disregard of self, deep interest in others, 
goodness of all kinds, largeness and nobleness of 
soul. Not a mean thing, nor an unjust one, can 
be found. Courtesy, delicacy equal to a woman's, 
love, all good qualities can be found in them ; 
not one bad one, or the intimation of a bad one. 
The greatest ruler of the seventeenth century 
was also the best and the noblest of the sover- 
eigns who, in that age, governed Europe. 



CHAPTER X. 



CHARACTER. 



The only positive evidence, within the knowl- 
edge of the writer of this book, adverse to the 
good character of Oliver Cromwell, is found in 
the registry of the parish church at Huntingdon ; 
and this evidence, having apparently escaped the 
observation of royalists for two hundred }^ears 
and more, was discovered by the Rev. Phillips 
Brooks, now the Bishop of Massachusetts, who 
a few years ago, while looking for the record of 
Oliver's baptism, found also a record which 
proves beyond a doubt that our hero did some- 
thing wrong, and was in some way punished, in 
the year 1616, when he was seventeen years old. 
This offense, which in a previous chapter has 
been alluded to as one which should not leave a 
permanent stain on his memory, stands alone 
235 



236 CHARACTER. 

among the charges unfavorable to Oliver's mem- 
ory supported by evidence. 

Other adverse charges are these : the pranks 
of boyhood, which need not detain us, and dissi- 
pation in early life. These are all, excepting 
that of cruelty in Ireland, which has been 
alleged by contradictory and untrustworthy roy- 
alist writers, and denied by those friendly to 
the Protector. Oliver's letters to the Irish 
people are a sufficient vindication. The charge 
of dissipation rests mainly on a few lines which 
Oliver wrote to a cousin when he was thirty-nine 
years old, in which he tells her that he had 
"loved darkness," and had been "the chief of 
sinners ; " a strong way of stating his condition 
before conversion. There is not, so far as we 
can learn, the slightest evidence to prove that 
Oliver was ever dissipated, either in youth or in 
his after life; not the slightest evidence that 
there was a stain on him, from his early years 
up to the time when, at about the age of forty, 
he ceased to be a farmer, with the exception of 
the record in the book of the parish church at 
Huntingdon. 

Oliver was brought up in a Low Church Epis- 
copal family, and had such a family the slightest 
chance, in James's time, for peace and quiet in 



CHARACTER. 237 

its worship, he might have remained all through 
his life a good farmer Low Churchman, and slept 
at last " guiltless of his country's blood," in the 
graveyard of the old parish in which he was 
baptized. \Yho knows what influence Laud's 
appointment as Archdeacon of Huntingdon had 
over him ? Who knows but that record of 
" discipline " in the old parish book may have 
changed the course of Oliver's life, and with it 
the course of English history ? 

It will be remembered that the quotations in 
the first chapter of this book from royalist 
writers contained no proofs of wickedness, or 
attempts at proofs ; contained only assertions or 
intimations of wickedness. Not one fact is given 
by Cleaveland, or Clarendon, or other royalist 
writers in support of the infamous titles and 
names which they attach to the Protector. 
These writers simply published their opinions, 
gave their impressions, told, and perhaps hon- 
estly, what they thought of Cromwell ; but in 
what they say there are no facts to show that 
he was the kind of man whom they represent 
him to have been. They brand him with scur- 
rilous names, and that is all. He is, in their 
view, a "bankrupt," "a hypocrite," "a religious 
whiffler," " a mountebank of State," " a veiled 



238 CHARACTER. 

devil," "a subtle bloodsucker," and "a canni- 
bal." One of them, it will be remembered, says 
that he had all the wickednesses against which 
damnation is denounced, and for which hell fire 
is prepared, but they relate nothing about him to 
substantiate this abuse, nothing to verify their 
allegations. Not an event of his private life is 
given for proof ; not one fact is alluded to, save 
those public acts which the greatest and best 
men of England shared with him, and to which 
Milton, both in prose and poetry, gave not 
only his sanction but his unlimited and warm 
approval. 

Some of these vituperative writers, it must be 
remembered, had praised the Protector while he 
was living, or soon after he was dead ; they had 
placed him among the supreme men of this 
earth ; had admitted him to a Pantheon ; the 
censure was an after thought — an offering to His 
Sacred Majesty, the king. It was not to be ex- 
pected that justice would be done to Cromwell by 
royalists in the age of Charles II. ; but it was not 
required of them so to defame him by lies as to 
shut him off: from all sympathy for two hundred 
years. Other Puritans have had their offenses 
forgiven. Milton, the Protector's secretary and 
eulogist, has his place in the great Abbey. 



CHARACTER. 239 

Hampden has his statue in St. Stephen's Hall ; 
Eliot and Pym are kindly remembered, but " our 
poor Oliver seems to hang yet on the gibbet, and 
find no hearty apologist anywhere." Is it not 
strange, says Carlyle, that after all the mountains 
of calumny this man has been subject to, after 
being represented as the Prince of Liars, who 
never, or hardly ever, spoke truth, but always 
some cunning counterfeit of truth, there should 
not yet have been one falsehood brought clearly 
home to him ? "A prince of liars, and no lie 
spoken by him ! " 

We have quoted, in the first chapter, from 
writers who defamed Cromwell ; we now give a 
few excerpts from those who wrote in his praise. 

The first is taken from John Banks's book, a 
panegyric presented to the Protector by the 
Portuguese ambassador, " written as pretended 
by a learned Jesuit, His Excellency's chaplain, 
but as more probably supposd by the celebrated 
John Milton." " I persuaded myself that you 
either equaled, or at least came nearer to, than 
any other, the image of a perfect hero. 
A nobility pure, free from all vanity, from all 
meanness, luxury, hautiness, vaunting of itself, 
clear, virtuous, brave, industrious. . . . Such 
a nobility as this, most illustrious Cromwell, we 



240 CHARACTER. 

have found to be yours, pure, solid, true, open, 
clear. . . . You have given us such a speci- 
men of your capacity that you may make it 
appear, if you was (sic) disposed to go on in the 
pursuit of learning, how very able you are to 
equal the greatest masters, just as Julius Caesar 
did, whose step you so nearly tread in. 
Cincinnatus lived not more innocently, Serranus 
not more incorruptly, Cato not more justly. 
Nor did you thrust 3 T ourself into 
honors, except only when the fortunes of the 
Commonwealth required your assistance. . . . 
You was (s/c) dragged to dignities by a sort 
of violence. . . . Discerning, ready, judi- 
cious, valiant, deliberative, expeditious, sagacious, 
crafty, careful, attentive, you foresaw every 
accident, prevented the meditated blow, dared 
the greatest danger, eluded the most artful strat- 
agem, embraced and improved every opportunity. 
Like lightning you struck before the thunder was 
heard. Great in fortitude as in council, you 
weighed the hazards of war, as if you feared 
them ; you went through them as though you 
despised them. Before danger wary, in it un- 
daunted. You arrogated nothing to yourself ; 
you detracted nothing from others. The actions 
you demanded for your own part ; but left the 



CHARACTER. 241 

fame of them to your fellows ; the clanger was 
yours, the glory theirs. . . . The magna- 
nimity of Alexander, the valor of Camillus, the 
constancy of Scipio, the force of Caesar, the 
skill of Belisarius, the fortitude of Scanderbeg, 
the violence of Gustavus Adolphus all unite in 
you ; you excel all of them in that wherein they 
most excel. . . . You first brought religion 
into the army, and taught your soldiers to war 
most against vices and irregular desires. No 
general was ever more tender of his soldiers than 
you. You watched carefully against all their 
inconveniences and inquired into their necessi- 
ties." Such was one estimate of Cromwell two 
hundred years ago. 

We now give a small part of John Maidstone's 
letter to Governor Winthrop, which was written 
in 1659. Maidstone knew Cromwell well ; 
knew him intimately, revered and loved him. 
He writes that the Protector had a head which 
was a vast storehouse, " a vast treasury of nat- 
ural parts ; " that his temper was exceedingly 
fiery, but that the flame of it was kept down or 
soon allayed by his moral endowments ; that he 
was naturally compassionate toward objects in 
distress, even to an effeminate degree ; that he 
did exceed in tenderness toward sufferers. " A 



242 CHARACTER. 

larger soul," writes Maidstone, " liatli seldom 
dwelt in a house of clay than his was. I do 
believe, if his story were impartially transmitted 
and the unprejudiced world well possessed with 
it, she would add him to her nine worthies, and 
make that number decem-viri" 

The Rev. Mr. Hooker, once a minister at New 
Haven, went to England in 1656. He became 
Oliver's chaplain. In a letter to Governor Win- 
throp dated April 13, 1657, he writes : " The 
Protector is urged iitrinqiie " (about that king- 
ship matter) " and I am ready to think willing 
enough to betake himself to private life, if it 
might be. . . . He is a godly man, much 
in prayer and good discourses, delighting in good 
men and good ministers, self-denying and ready 
to promote any good work for Christ." Mark, 
reader, that this testimony comes from one who 
knew Oliver near the end of his life, when it is 
commonly thought he had lost what little piety, 
and even affectation of piety, he had had in his 
earlier life. 

Milton hails the Protector as the savior of 
England. He salutes him as men in our times 
have saluted Washington. He calls him not 
only "the chief of men," but, what is better, 
calls him "the father of his country." " This," 




OLIVER CROMWELL. 
{From the celebrated print by II. Faithorne, London.) 



CHARACTER. 243 

Milton says, " is the tender appellation by which 
all the good among us salute you from the very 
soul ; " and he closes a calm, just eulogy in 
these words: "While you, O Cromwell, are left 
among us, he hardly shows a proper confidence 
in the Supreme who distrusts the security of 
England." 

A courtier from the court of Charles II., from 
Clarendon down to Bates, was not competent to 
measure Cromwell. 

It is with peculiar pleasure that we give our 
readers the views of Samuel R. Gardiner, author 
of the "History of the Great Civil War." Mr. 
Gardiner says that " in forming a judgment on 
Cromwell it is absolutely necessary to take Car- 
lyle's monumental work as a starting-point. Ev- 
ery satisfactory effort to understand the character 
of a man must be based on his own spoken and 
written words, though it is always possible to 
throw further light and shade from other sources." 
My comment on this is, at the risk of repetition, 
that there is not a line in any one of the Crom- 
well letters, nor a word in any one of the 
Cromwell speeches, which an advocate for his 
pure and noble character would wish to have 
erased. Warburton's " dark and crafty " hypo- 
crite is undiscoverable in the letters and speeches. 



244 CHARACTER. 

After subjecting the writings of Cromwell's 
enemies, which are " to the last degree unfavor- 
able to his uprightness of character, to the first 
rules of criticism " (the words are Gardiner's), 
this historian says : "It was with no little sur- 
prise that I found one charge after another melt 
away, as I was able to fix a date to the words or 
actions which had given rise to hostile comments. 
Thus tested, the Cromwell of Lilburne and Wild- 
man shows himself the same man as the Cromwell 
of his letters and the Clarke papers ; no divinely 
inspired hero, indeed, or faultless monster, but a 
brave honorable man, striving according to his 
lights to lead his countrymen into the paths of 
peace and godliness." 

These words were written by Gardiner after he 
had spent seven years in his investigations ; a 
much longer time than Carlyle spent on his work 
of Oliver. 

It will be remembered that Carlyle, fifty years 
ago, did not know what he would make of Oliver, 
what kind of a man he would find him to have 
been ; and now, one of the most prominent 
English historians expresses his surprise to find 
the charges against the Protector " melt away," 
and reveal Oliver as not only brave but honor- 
able, and " leading his countrymen into the paths 



CHARACTER. 245 

of godliness." Kather remarkable testimony this 
as to Oliver's moral character ! This historian 
also says that after the war was ended Cromwell 
clung with pertinacity to the old institutions of 
the realm ; that it was GofTe more than Cromwell 
who proposed prayer meetings — that Oliver 
called for committees ; that " among those who 
desired to give satisfaction to the king, Cromwell 
is undoubtedly to be reckoned ; " that in a speech 
three hours long he held the attention of the 
House, pleading the cause of monarchy and urg- 
ing the Parliament to re-establish the throne, as- 
serting that it had been his aim during the whole 
war to strengthen and not destroy monarchy ; 
that he would have Charles to be king as AVilliam 
III. was afterward a king ; but that was a con- 
dition to which Charles would not stoop. " But 
the time came," says Gardiner, " when Cromwell 
found that all his efforts in the king's behalf 
were thrown away." Baffled by the House of 
Commons and unsupported by Charles, Crom- 
well's mediatory position became untenable. 

In the army Cromwell was now denounced as a 
mere time-server, bent upon currying favor with 
Charles in pursuit of his own private interests. 
It was at this time that Cromwell himself wrote 
these words : " Though it may be, for the present, 



246 CHARACTER. 

a cloud may lie over our actions to those who are 
not acquainted with the grounds of them, yet we 
doubt not but that God will clear our integrity 
and innocency from any other ends we aim at 
but his glory and the public good." 

There is one writer whom we cannot pass by, 
especially when we recall the animadversions of 
Guizot. Carlyle's Cromwell seems instantly to 
have made H. A. Taine, one of the ablest thinkers 
and writers of our day, a believer in Cromwell as 
a man " struck by the idea of duty." The view 
of this great Frenchman is wholly different from 
that of Louis Philippe's minister. Taine has 
discovered a hero worth recovering and bringing 
into sight ; a noble heart beneath the rugged 
crust of Puritanism ; a man with definite in- 
stincts and faculties ; English to the core ; a 
great soul like one of Shakespeare's. Taine sees 
that Carlyle has unearthed one of the noblest 
men of past centuries ; that Cromwell has risen 
from the dead ; that one can know now what he 
felt, suffered and wished ; that he stands on 
things and not on the show of things ; that he is 
a reality and not the harlequin of Charles's cour- 
tiers ; that at last we are " face to face " with 
Cromwell ; that we have his words, that we hear 
his tone of voice, and that now we " are firmly 



CHARACTER. 247 

planting our feet upon the truth." Cromwell 
comes forth to Taine's eye reformed and renewed. 
He quits his French ideas and finds this grand 
sentiment in Cromwell, "am I a just man?" 
He tells us that Oliver believed in a sublime and 
terrible God; that how to worship him was not 
a trifling thing. 

In making an estimate of the man, we call 
upon our readers to note, in the first place, the 
complete absence of all positive bad qualities. 
You may search all the books about him from 
Bates and Dugdale down, all histories, poems, 
school text books, all his speeches and letters, 
and you cannot discover that he had at any time 
of his life one evil thought or purpose. To assert 
that he went through his nearly sixty years free 
from evil thoughts, would be absurd ; but we 
do assert that no royalist has shown or can show 
a single deed emanating from a wicked purpose. 
Temper he had, and he had use for it ; but apart 
from temper, such as was shown in the fen 
drainage business, and in breaking up the Long 
Parliament, it is impossible for any defamer to 
prove that he had any moral weakness or 
infirmity. 

Buckle has remarked that only "two other 
men have done what Oliver succeeded in doing ; 



248 CHARACTER. 

only Julius Caesar and Napoleon I. ; these three 
alone have combined great soldiership with suc- 
cessful statesmanship." 

We do not wish to linger over a statement 
like this. It awakens no emotions or pleasant 
thoughts. 

One epithet to be found in Canon Kingsley's 
writings, " dear old Oliver Cromwell," is of more 
value than this praise from the author of the 
"History of Civilization." It is not Oliver's 
greatness which interests us. We have said little 
about that in these pages ; we care to say but 
little about it. It is not the great whom we 
cling to ; it is the good, the true, the noble, the 
pure, the kind, the loving. Cromwell's elevation 
from a farming life to the rank of the world's 
conquerors, and to a place by the side of kings, 
inspires no particular sympathy for him ; it is 
the man himself, the deep clear soul of him ; it 
is the whiteness of his character ; it is the heart 
beneath the rough form, which nearly three hun- 
dred years ago moved about in the poor house of 
Ely ; it is the hand which penned the note for 
poor sick Benson ; it is the eye which glistened 
so often with sorrowful tears when it saw distress 
and want ; it is the gratitude, the kindliness, the 
friendship, the desire for social life, which indited 



CHARACTER. 249 

the letter to Downhall ; it is the craving to see 
and embrace his "Biddy" who was far off in 
Ireland ; it is the soldier who could find pleasure 
in hearing' that his children are bavins: a good 
time in the June days under cherry-trees, while 
he, the father, is on his way to the wars ; it is 
the philanthropy which instructed Mr. Knyvett 
not to allow his tenant Brown to "trouble 
honest poor neighbors ; " it is the warrior sitting 
in his tent writing to a bereaved father that his 
son is " a saint in heaven ; " it is Oliver plead- 
ing for a poor widow whose husband, on his death- 
bed, had asked his thought and care ; Oliver, the 
advocate of justice, mercy and charity ; Oliver 
asking for a place in the customs for one who 
had poor parents, and who was an object of 
pity : Oliver blazing into anger at the atrocities 
in Piedmont, melting into tears for the sufferers, 
sending them aid, arresting his diplomacy with 
Mazarin, and telling the Pope that if the Duke 
of Savoy stop not his persecutions, English 
cannon shall be heard at the Vatican. 

This is the man who interests us. It is the 
sensitive, excitable, scrupulous, sympathetic, af- 
fectionate, prayerful man ; just the same on the 
little farm of St. Ives that he was in Whitehall. 
AVe know but little of him, but that little deeply 



250 CHARACTER. 

interests us. It makes us revere and love him. 
" Magnanimity and mercy," says Richard Garnett, 
" shine forth with a brightness fully effacing the 
worst charges against him." " There are but 
few indeed," says Frederick Harrison, " in whom 
the family affections nourish a spirit so pure in 
the midst of distracting public duties to the last 
hour of an overburdened life. . . . For the 
thirty-eight years of his married life Crom- 
well was all that a loving husband and father 
could be, overflowing with affection even on the 
battlefield and in the stress of affairs, indulgent, 
but not weak, considerate, provident, just, counsel- 
ing, reproving, exhorting, yearning to lead his 
children to feel his own intense sense of God's 
presence." 

Dean Stanley says that " Oliver Cromwell, 
when he came to wield the power of Church and 
State, of universities and of armies alike was 
tolerant to a degree which his humble followers 
were incapable of imitating or understanding." 
Bishop Burnet remarked that the Protector 
showed his good understanding in nothing more 
than in seeking out capable and worthy men for 
all employments, but most particularly for the 
courts of law which gave a general satisfaction. 
Thurloe is said to have been offered a place by 



CHARACTER. 251 

Charles II. when the Protectorate was ended, 
and to have expressed his fears about serving 
His Majesty as he had served the Protector, for 
Oliver was " a man who sought men for places, 
and not places for men." 

What Lord Clarendon so well said of Mon- 
trose is equally true of Cromwell : " He never 
declined any enterprise for the difficulty of go- 
ing through with it ; " and Clarendon, the greatest 
of the old royalist writers, gives qualified praise 
to Cromwell, when he says that "his wicked- 
nesses could not have accomplished his trophies 
without the assistance of a great spirit, an ad- 
mirable circumspection and sagacity, and a most 
magnanimous resolution." 

Macaulay, before he was thirty years old, had 
overcome his royalist prejudices, and no longer 
wrote, as at the age of seven, that Oliver was 
" an unjust and wicked man." He became the 
champion of the Protector in his fifth article in 
the Edinburgh Review in 1828. 

Hallam had written of Cromwell as one who 
" had sucked only the dregs of a besotted fanati- 
cism," while he spoke of Napoleon as " one to 
whom the stores of reason and philosophy were 
open." The young reviewer dared to tell the 
great historian that while Cromwell was inferior 



252 CHARACTER. 

to Bonaparte in invention, he was far superior to 
him in wisdom ; that Cromwell's " fanaticism 
never confused his perceptions of the public 
good ; " that " never was any ruler so conspicu- 
ously born for sovereignty; " that his "mind ex- 
panded more rapidly than his fortunes ; " that 
" insignificant as a private citizen, he was a great 
general, and a still greater prince ; that he was 
a man who left his own character to take care of 
itself ; that no sovereign ever carried to the throne 
so strong a sympathy with the interest and feel- 
ings of his people ; and that he went down to 
his grave in the fullness of power and fame." 

Oliver not only left his character to take care 
of itself, but he seems to have been utterly 
oblivious as to his literary reputation. Some of 
his war letters are remarkable for their strength 
and clearness ; but he took no pains to preserve 
them. His speeches were great speeches, but he 
could not, after giving them, recall the language 
which he had used. He was once asked to fur- 
nish the Parliament with a copy of a speech ; he 
could not comply with the request. The " thing," 
a favorite word with him, was what he was con- 
cerned with ; not oratory or fame. 

The religion of the established church, in the 
opinion of Charles II., was the only religion ex- 



CHARACTER. 253 

cept that of Rome, fit for a gentleman ; the re- 
ligion of Cromwell was not so much for gentle- 
men as for sinners ; but while he clung to 
doctrines which are now regarded as too rigid, 
and by the majority of Christians as untenable, 
he constantly illustrated in his life the spirit of 
his divine Master. But by nearly all writers he 
has been represented as insincere, and the title 
by which he is commonly recognized is that of 
hypocrite. The Boston Advertiser of January 
21, 1846, touches on this charge in the following 
statement : " One point Mr. Carlyle has settled ; 
it is Cromwell's sincerity. Not the most bigoted 
follower of the Clarendon school will repeat the 
old-fashioned cant about Cromwell's hypocrisy 
and falsehood." This passage may have been 
written by Edward Everett Hale; if not by him, 
then by his distinguished father, the editor of 
the Boston Advertiser. The question of Oliver's 
sincerity is undoubtedly settled by the letters, 
the speeches, and by Carlyle's elucidations. It 
should have been settled by the " State Papers " of 
Thurloe long before Carlyle discovered the letters 
and did his " job of buck-washing " on the 
speeches. Those folios, which had so little value 
in Walter Scott's day, prove that Oliver was not 
"a man of falsehoods, but a man of truths." 



254 CHARACTER. 

There are terrible stories told by royalists in 
connection with the death of King Charles, in 
order to show that Oliver was a brutal man. 
One of these, the surgical operation story of Dr. 
Bates, has been disposed of ; the king's body was 
not so mutilated. But it is affirmed that at the 
time of the signing of the death warrant, Oliver 
smeared Henry Martyn's face with ink, and that 
he, with others, forced Richard Ingoldsby, he re- 
sisting, to put his name to the fatal paper by 
holding and guiding his hands. The story is 
based on Ingoldsby 's applying for a pardon after 
the restoration ; but he had not the death war- 
rant to support his statement. The thing in 
itself is incredible ; but it is proved to be a lie 
by Bishop Warburton who thus writes : " The 
original warrant is still extant, and Ingoldsby's 
name has no such mark of its being wrote in 
that manner." The ink story we cannot refute ; 
let it stand, and let royalists get all the comfort 
they can out of it. We know the sympathy 
which Cromwell had for Charles I. and his little 
children, how he wept when he saw them to- 
gether ; and the account of his going to the 
room where the king's body lay on the night 
after the execution may here be given, as a con- 
trast to the above relations. Mr. Gardiner thinks 



CHARACTER. 255 

this touching story credible. Lord Southampton 
and a friend obtained permission to sit and watch 
through the night at Whitehall with the dead 
king. About midnight, a man closely muffled 
entered the room, approached the coffin, opened 
the lid, gazed upon the face, and said, " cruel 
necessity." Southampton was not sure, but he 
thought the voice was the voice of Cromwell. 

In support of the positions taken in this book, 
and keeping in view its main object, which is the 
vindication of England's Protector, I now quote 
from the last Encyclopaedia Britain] ica. " Had 
Cromwell been less of a Christian and more of a 
Pagan, historians might have accorded to him 
some of that leniency with which they have 
spoken of the vices of a Caesar or a Peter the 
Great. But the same office which cowardly 
hands had done for his bones, servility, ignorance 
and prejudice did for his memory; and during 
most part of two centuries the name of the 
greatest man of his own age and one of the 
noblest of any age, has been associated with all 
the infamy that belongs to a life-long career of 
unmitigated hypocrisy and insatiable ambition. 
Truth, however, at length begins to prevail, and 
Cromwell's own prophetic hope is attaining ful- 
fillment. i I know God has been above all ill 



256 CHARACTER. 

reports, and will in his own time vindicate me.' 
In speaking, says Milton, of a man so great and 
who has deserved so signally of this Common- 
wealth, I shall have done nothing if I merely 
acquit him of having committed any crime, es- 
pecially since it concerns not only the Common- 
wealth but myself individually, as one so closely 
conjoined in the same infamy, to show to all 
nations and ages, so far as I can, the supreme 
excellence of his character and his supreme 
worthiness of all praise." This article closes 
with these words : " He was a man for all ages 
to admire, for all Britons to honor in proud re- 
membrance. No royal name, at least since 
Alfred's, is more worthy of our veneration than 
that of the Usurper, Oliver Cromwell." 

Remarkable is this testimony considering where 
it stands. Fifty years ago such praise in an 
English encyclopaedia would have been impossi- 
ble. The writer of it acknowledges the debt to 
Carlyle, and says that he will enable posterity to 
know what kind of a man Oliver Cromwell 
really was. 

Carlyle will enable scholars to know his hero, 
but his book never will be read except by a few ; 
and hence the need of such books as the present 
one. And here I cannot but remark, that a life 



CHARACTER. 257 

of Oliver which will command general attention, 
and have a permanent place in literature, will 
surely be the work of some future writer. It 
will take many years to do it, but it will be 
done. Outside of the letters and speeches, Car- 
lyle left vast old fields unexplored. If he read 
Thurloe, he made but little use of his vast 
materials. He complains that Thurloe had no 
useful index, and the absence of allusions to 
scenes depicted and events related in the " State 
Papers," indicates that he never carefully went 
through the book. " Not one of these monstrous 
old volumes — the Rushworth's, Whitelocke's, 
Nalson's, Thurloe's " — he says, " has so much 
as an available index." He calls them " dreary 
old records." He is in error ; Thurloe's is a won- 
derfully interesting book ; and the London edition 
of 1742 has a complete Cromwell index at the 
end of each volume. Years could be spent in 
New England libraries alone in collecting materi- 
als for a life of Cromwell which would be worthy 
of an enduring place in literary annals. 

Our little task is done. It has been the story 
of a great hero who was the possessor of all 
those qualities which fit a man to guide and to 
govern his fellowmen ; a ruler who sowed seeds 
which lay dormant for a generation and then 



258 CHARACTER. 

bore good fruit for all coming time ; a Protector 
who watched with anxious thought and noble 
courage over England, over the Protestants of 
Europe and the colonists in America ; a man 
free from hypocrisy and insincerity, whose charac- 
ter was illumined by all Christian virtues, and 
who illustrated in his life the principles which 
he had learned from a divine Master. 



INDEX. 



Addison, on Milton, 7. 
Alva, Duke of, bloody work of, 63, 64. 
American School History on Crom- 
well, 29. 
Armada, the, 113. 
Atterbury, Dean, on Milton, 8. 

Banks, John, on Cromwell, 8. 

Bates, Dr. George, on Cromwell, 3. 

Beard, Dr., Schoolmaster to Crom- 
well, 42, 47, 49. 

" Bishops' War," the, 109. 

Blake, Admiral, and his victories, 
149, 168, 169. 

Bourchier, Elizabeth, wife of Oliver 
Cromwell, 59. 

Brooks, Rev. Phillips, on Crom- 
well, 235. 

Buckle, on Cromwell, 247. 

Burnet, Bishop, on Cromwell, 154, 



Carlyle, Thomas., ignores Bates on 
Cromwell, 3 ; on writers on 
Cromwell, 8 ; his life of Crom- 
well, 30, 34, 256 ; our debt to, 
33 ; on Mark Noble's aspersions, 
75 ; his Cromwell letters, 78 ; on 
the Protectorate Parliament, 144 ; 
on Richard Cromwell, 184, 209 ; 
on life at Whitehall, 193. 



Chambers's Encyclopaedia on Car- 
lyle's Cromwell, 36. 

Charles I., attempts to seize the mem- 
bers of Parliament, 79; his ob- 
stinacy, 83 ; defeat of, 94 ; at 
Hampton Court, 119; his death 
decided on, 123. 

Charles II., King, his boyish quarrel 
with Cromwell, 56 ; invited to 
Dublin, 96; prospects gone, 99 ; 
proclaimed King of Scots and of 
England, 99; retreats to Wor- 
cester, 104 ; flight of, 106 ; re- 
fused an audience with Maza- 
rin, 155. 

Civil War, the, Causes of, 80. 

Clarendon, Lord, on Cromwell, 14, 
23, 67, 170, 173. 

Cleaveland, John, on Cromwell, 12, 

13. 23- 

" Court of Blood," Alva's, 64. 
Court of High Commission, the 3. 
Cowley, Abraham, on Cromwell, 12, 

14, i5. 16. 

Craik, George, on Waller, 10. 
Cromwell, Bridget, second daughter 

of Oliver, marries Ireton, 

1S5. 
Cromwell, Elizabeth, daughter of 

Oliver, marries Clay pole, 185 ; 

death of, 206. 



INDEX. 



Cromwell, Frances, daughter of Oli- 
ver, marries Rich, 185. 

Cromwell, Sir Henry, grandfather of 
Oliver Cromwell, 52. 

Cromwell, Henry, son of Oliver, 66 ; 
ability of, 184. 

Cromwell, Oliver, neglected by his- 
torians, 1 ; lives of, 1, 2 ; let- 
ters of, 2 ; Pepys's good words 
fcr, 3 ; grand nature of, 11; 
Hutchinson and, iS ; Ludlow 
and, 20; " Letters and Speeches," 
24 ; aspersions on, disproved, 
27 ; his birthplace, 42 ; his 
parents, 43, 44; boyhood of, 
45, 48 ; his sports, 50 ; indiff- 
erence to dress, 55 ; his fa- 
ther's business, 56; at college, 57, 
59; made captain, 58; marriage, 
59 ; as a farmer, 60, 61, 64, 66, 
68, 75 ; member of Parliament, 
71 ; succeeds to his uncle's prop- 
erty at Ely, 71 ; letter to Mrs. 
St. John, 75 ; his letters, 78 ; 
takes little share in bringing 
about the Civil War, 82 ; in the 
Parliament of 1640, 82 ; in House 
of Commons, 84 ; Captain of 
Troop 67, 85 ; at Battle of Edge- 
hill, S5; in the army of Parliament, 
86 ; at Battle of Gainsborough, 
87 ; second in command, 88 ; at 
Winceby fight, 88 ; at York and 
Marston Moor, 88; at Newbury, 
89; brings charges against Earl 
of Manchester, 90; retired, 90 ; 
recalled by Fairfax, 92 ; at Nase- 
by, 93 ; at Preston, 95 ; in Ire- 
land, 96, 97 ; made commander- 
in-chief, 100; in Scotland, 100; 
at Dunbar Battle, 102 ; at Battle 
of Worcester, 105 ; recklessness 
of, 105; his greatness, 106; mem- 



ber of the Parliament of 1628, 
107; of 1640, in ; his ecclesias- 
tical education, 112, 114 ; his hon- 
esty, 1x6; King Charles, and, 
119, 121 ; at Windsor Castle 
prayer meeting, 123 ; signs King 
Charles's death warrant, 124 ; 
named Protector, 124; reception 
by London, 125; his patriotism, 
126 ; the " soul of the Common- 
wealth," 130; dissolves the Par- 
liament, 132, 134; summons the 
notables, 135; named Lord Pro- 
tector of England, Ireland and 
Scotland, 138 ; called the Con- 
stable, 138 ; strengthens the 
naval power, 142; dissolves Par- 
liament, 143 ; asked to accept 
title of King, 146; declines, 147, 
149; illness of, 151; his last 
speech in Parliament, 152; sup- 
presses the royalist insurrection, 
154; supremacy of England un- 
der, 157 ; recognition of by Euro- 
pean powers, 157 ; signs three 
treaties of peace, 166; naval suc- 
cesses of, 169 ; his greatness 
abroad, 170, 173 ; and the Hugue- 
nots, 175 ; his foreign policy, 178 ; 
our debt of gratitude to, 181 ; 
life at Whitehall, 1S4, 1S8, 194, 
196 ; letters on his daughter's 
marriage, 1S6 ; letter to his 
daughter-in-law, 1S7; his sports, 
192 ; his mother at Whitehall ; 
195 ; the Jews and, 201 ; inaugu- 
ration as Protector, 203 ; marriage 
of his daughters, 204 ; overthrows 
a royalist insurrection, 205 ; death, 
207 ; his letters : to Downhall, 
208; toHand, 212; to his wife, 
215 : to Anthony Hungerford, 
220; to Mr Mayor, 222, 223; to 



INDEX. 



Henry Cromwell, 225 ; to a com- 
mittee of the army, 226; to Car- 
dmalMazarin, 227, 229; to Rhode 
Island Colony, 230; to the Com- 
missioners of Maryland, 231 ; to 
the Governor of Virginia, 231 ; 
to the Governor of Barbadoes, 
232 ; his character, 235, 245, 248, 
252 ; his early religious training, 
236 ; his sympathy for King 
Charles, 254. 

Cromwell, Sir Oliver, uncle of Oliver 
Cromwell, 43, his home, 52 ; 
knighted by King J^mes, 55. 

Cromwell, Mary, daughter of Oliver, 
marries Fauconberg, 185. 

Cromwell, Richard, son of Oliver, 
27,66; his character, 184; mar- 
ries Dorothy Mayor, 185. 

Cromwell, Robert, father of Oliver 
Cromwell, 43, 56, 57, 59. 

" Declaration to the Irish Bishops," 

the, 97. 
Downhall, John, letter to, 208. 
Dryden, on Cromwell, 10, n. 
Dublin, English fleet at, 97. 
Dugdale, vituperates Cromwell, 72. 
Dunbar, Battle of, 102. 

Eliot, Sir John, death of, 69; frames 
"Petition of Rights," 70; his 
appeals, 70. 

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, and Car- 
lyle, 35 

Fairfax, Sir Thomas, chief in com- 
mand, 90; requests Cromwell's 

; recall, 91 ; secures him as a per- 
manent officer, 92 ;'declines to go 
against the Scots, 100. 

Fiske, John, on Carlyle's " Crom- 
well," 31. 



Fleetwood, letter to, 200. 

Froude, on the Church and the Puri- 
tans, 81 ; on Carlyle's " Crom- 
well," 35. 

Gardiner, Samuel R., on Cromwell, 
243- 

Garnett, Richard, on Cromwell, 250. 

Gray, William, defamation of Crom- 
well in his " Elegy," 2. 

Green, on the Puritans, 50. 

Griffis, William Elliot, on the Neth- 
erlands, 60, 62. 

Guizot, on Cromwell, 26, 246. 

Gunpowder Plot, the, 114. 

Hallam, on Cromwell, 52, 251. 

Hand, letter to, 212. 

Hampden, John, cousin of Crom- 
well, 62, 82, 86. 

Harrison, Frederick, on Cromwell, 
126, 250. 

Heath, John, chief of the literary liars 
about Cromwell, 9, 23. 

Hooker, Rev. Mr., on Cromwell, 242. 

Hugupnots, the, and Cromwell, 175. 

Hume, David, works over Heath's 
misstatements, 9; misrepresents 
Cromwell, 22, 23, 24; his his- 
tory, 24, 25 

Hungerford, Anthony, letter to, 220. 

Huntingdon, birthplace of Cromwell, 
42. 

Hutchinson, Colonel, and Cromwell, 
I 7, 18, 19. 50. 

Hutchinson, Mrs., on Cromwell, 16, 
*7» i9, 26, 50. 

Independents and Presbyterians, 115, 

116. 
" Ironsides," the, 96. 

James, King, at Hinchinbrook, 53, 
54, 57- 



INDEX. 



Jeffrey, Francis, on Cromwell, 16, 17. 
Jews, the, and Cromwell, 201. 
Jongestall's account of a reception 

and dinner at Whitehall, 189, 

191. 
Joyce, Cornet, rescues King Charles, 

118. 

Kingsley, on Cromwell, 248. 

Laud, Archbishop, at Hinchinbrook, 
57; impeachment of, in; of- 
fered a cardinal's cap, 113. 

Lely, Cromwell's direction to, 33. 

Lesley, David, commander of the 
Scottish royal forces, 10 1. 

Lincoln's Inn, Thurloe's papers in, 2. 

Lingard, on Cromwell, 165. 

" Little Parliament," the, 136. 

Lockhart, William, Cromwell's rep- 
resentative at the French Court, 
177. 

" Long Parliament," the, see " Par- 
liament of 1640 " 

" Lord of the Fens," nickname of 
Cromwell, 67. 

Louis XIV., sends embassy to con- 
gratulate Cromwell, 155. 

Ludlow, his fabrications falsified, 2 ; 
wrong impressions of, 19; enemy 
to Cromwell, 20, 21, 26. 

Macaulay, Lord, on Cromwell, 17; 
33,251. 

Magdalene College, Pepys's diary in 
library of, 3. 

Maidstone, John, letter to Governor 
Winthrop on Cromwell, 241. 

Manchester, Earl of, in chief com- 
mand, 8S ; refuses to pursue the 
king, 89 ; disagreement with 
Cromwell, 90. 

Marston Moor, Battle of, 89. 



Masham, Sir William, 62. 

Mayor, Dorothy, Cromwell's daugh- 
ter-in-law, 1S7. 

Mazarin, Cardinal, letter to, 227, 229. 

" Mercurius Britannicus," on Crom- 
well, 92. 

Milton, John, 1; in Westminster, 7; 
friend of Cromwell, 16; his praise 
of Cromwell, 124, 239, 242, 256. 

Montrose and Cromwell, 251. 

Naseby, Battle of, 93. 
Newcastle, Battle of, no. 
Noble, John, on Cromwell, 9. 
Noble, Mark, on Cromwell, 75. 

Ormond, Duke of, invites Prince 
Charles to Dublin, 96. 

Parliament of 1628, the, statesmen 

in, 70; dissolution of, 70. 
Parliament of 1640, the, no. 
Pepys, on Cromwell, 3. 
" Petition of Rights," the, 70. 
Philip II. of Spain, influence on 

English liberty, 62. 
Phillips, John, Latin inscription on, 

7,8. 
Puritans neglect of Cromwell, 1. 
Puritan Notables, the, meet, 135. 
Prayer Book, passage on Cromwell 

expunged, 28. 
Preston, Battle of, 95. 
Protectorate Parliament, the, 138, 

144. 
Protectorate Parliament, the second, 

MS- 

Rees and Thurlow, 39. 

" Rump Parliament, the," 132. 

Rupert, Prince, 8S, 93. 

Russia, Czar of and Cromwell, 159. 

Scott, Sir Walter, defamation of 
Cromwell in " Woodstock," 2. 



INDEX. 



" Self-Denying Ordinance," the, 
90, 92. 

South, Robert, on Oliver Cromwell, 
10, 12. 

Spain, war with, 168. 

St. John, the lawyer, defends Hamp- 
den, 62. 

Stanley, Dean, on Oliver Cromwell, 
250. 

Star Chamber Court, 3. 

Steward, Sir Thomas, leaves Crom- 
well property at Ely, 71 ; his 
property described, 73. 

Stuarts, the, neglect of Cromwell, 1 ; 
Dr. Bates's loyalty to, 3 ; cham- 
pion of, 6. 

Taine, on Cromwell, 246; on Car- 
lyle's " Life of Cromwell," 36, 
37- 

Thurloe, Lord, hidden papers of, 
2; and the established church, 
39 ; on Cromwell's toleration, 
115 ; on a dinner at Whitehall, 
188. 

Trevelyan, on Macaulay's youthful 
essay on Cromwell, 17. 



Trinity College, Hartford, Bates's 
book on Cromwell in library 
of, 3- 

Waller, on Cromwell, 10. 

Warburton, Bishop, on Ludlow, 19. 

Warburton, Eliot, on Cromwell's 
letters, 233. 

Wentworth, Paul, and the Petition 
of Rights, 70 ; his bill for a Fast 
for the House, 81. 

Westminster, Dean of, stops inscrip- 
tion to memory of Phillips, 7. 

Wheelwright, John, opponent of 
Cromwell at foot-ball, 51. 

Whitelocke, Bulstrode, congratulates 
Cromwell, 125 ; in conference, 
129 ; his account of it, 130 ; 
urges the kingship upon Crom- 
well, 147. 

Worcester, Battle of, 105. 

William III., accession of, 1, 6. 

William III. and Cromwell, deserv- 
ing of the thanks of the people of 
England, 156. 

Windsor Castle, the prayer meeting 
at, 122. 



